


Blessed & Cursed

by tyoungi



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Angels, Dark, Demons, Gore, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-08 00:55:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 50,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17971385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyoungi/pseuds/tyoungi
Summary: In a small Damyang town, a chthonic elder god wakes, resulting in murder and mayhem, and therefore forcing the reincarnated minion of a devil to deal with the unsettled past.





	1. Chapter 1

The body was a mess of detached, arranged limbs and exposed organs bursting outwards as if they could never have fit inside the narrow abdomen. The smell was abominable, but given the cool temperature, nothing like what it might have been if it were earlier in the year.

Doyoung tried keeping his eyes on the boy’s face (eyes wide, mouth slightly open, as if shocked, skin tightening around the skull with the beginnings of decay) because when he let his gaze wander over the exposed liver, lungs, and intestines, the arms detached at the shoulders and the legs at the hips, the wounds that adorned available skin, he found himself seeing meat and nothing but meat.

Aside from the body, it was a beautiful November day in the woods. The last snowfall in October had dried back to nothing more than the occasional a layer of dirty ice amongst the fallen leaves, and the sky overhead was a crisp, icy blue. The nearby trees stood far apart and each as large as monsters, with trunks that Doyoung couldn’t have put his arms even half-way around. Bare, tangled branches scrabbled up at the blue sky and everything, from the magnificent trees to the bite of chill in the air, seemed to be waiting for snow.

While Woobin, the coroner, busied himself by taking apart the pile, Doyoung got up the courage to make his way over to the police chief. Mr. Jang was busy nursing a cup of black coffee and looking more than a little annoyed, as if the murder that had rearranged his schedule for the day was an inconvenience meant to offend him personally.

“Why is the radio giving out that it was a bear attack?” Doyoung asked, a bit more pointedly than he meant to.

Mr. Jang squinted at him, disgruntled. “Who are you?” he demanded. “You work for Woobin?”

“No. I work for you,” Doyoung said shortly, and decided not to elaborate as to at what capacity. “For a year now.”

Mr. Jang scowled and looked away. Damyang was a tiny town, with a tourist population more than double the civilian, and a minimal police force made up almost entirely of officers who took up the job because they intended to retire shortly, wanted to keep things quiet until they did, and had deemed Damyang suitable. It was small enough that Mr. Jang should have known all of the citizens, let alone all of his employees.

“It hasn’t been declared a homicide yet,” he said darkly. “We don’t want to upset any tourists.”

There was no ‘we’ to it, Doyoung guessed. The Tourism Board had decided, and Tourism Board tended to get their way over city council, mayor, and police, usually with less than a squawk of protest.

“Well, I’m ready to declare it a homicide here and now,” Woobin called over, having apparently overheard their conversation. “If this here was the work of a bear, the kid would’ve been eaten. Some fucking psycho did this, mark me on that. Kid, get over here— help me pile it into the bag.”

Technically, contrary to what he had told Mr. Jang, Doyoung was working for Woobin, if only for the day. Damyang was too small to have its own coroner or morgue, and so those duties went to the small city of North side, which was forty-five minutes’ drive down the mountains. Woobin's usual assistant had hit a deer on the drive up and broken his collarbone, and so Doyoung, whose day didn’t usually include anything more exciting than filing traffic incident reports, had been called out of the office to lend a hand. Mostly, that consisted of handing Woobin's whatever particular tools he asked for, and taking a lot of photographs that were only going to be extraneous to those taken by the crime scene photographer (another North side man, and he was in and out within the hour, so fast that Doyoung never learned his name).

He had rubber gloves on, but that didn’t make the activity of picking up stiff, cold arms or lungs any less unpleasant. He put each piece gingerly and delicately into the black body bag, constantly alternating between horrified disgust and guilt for feeling so at what was once a human being, and deserved some respect in death— certainly, more respect than he’d gotten thus far, from either his murderer or the team investigating his murder.

Woobin kept getting distracted from the task. He would occasionally set down whatever part he was supposed to be moving, such as a liver, and start prodding other parts, muttering to himself. “Not much smell or sign of shit— and nothing in the stomach, here— it was starved a few days beforehand,” this said while giving the intestines a good jab. Doyoung tried not to look. And then, fishing the arm that Doyoung had already placed in the body bag back out: “And look here— cigarette burns.”

“He was tortured, then,” Doyoung said loudly. Woobin was an eccentric, balding man with an unkempt look to himself and slightly wild, protuberant eyes. Doyoung usually encountered him whenever someone died of a heart attack in their home, or in a car accident after driving drunk, or after an accident on the slopes. He heard, through the office gossip, that Woobin had once had an illustrious career, identifying the bodies of many migrants along the border of Korea, and investigating two especially prolific serial killers (some ten years apart) in Seoul. He had tried his hand at retirement, for all of six months, before he decided he simply had to go back to work— but his wife had insisted on the far more peaceful locale of North side, which was unlikely to have even one murder a year. Woobin had the bad habit of referring to the corpses he worked with— be they the victims of murder or little old ladies who died in their sleep— as ‘it’, and now, particularly, the habit was grating on Doyoung’s nerves.

Woobin looked up at him, surprised. Then down at the corpse’s face, and then back up at Doyoung. “You know,” he said, as if observing something he couldn’t make sense of, “It looks just like you.”

Doyoung looked down at the face.

Woobin, for all his insensitivity, was right. The other boy could must been within a year of Doyoung’s age. He was, Doyoung guessed, maybe a bit taller, maybe a bit bulkier, but still possessing the slenderness that generally made high school unpleasant. His face was pretty and slim, other than the shrinking skin, and the features, from cheeks to pointed chin to narrow nose, were eerily similar to Doyoung’s own. The hair was a shade darker, but only the eyes were truly different; Doyoung have an unique eyes which similar to a bunny.

The wind picked up, and Doyoung spared a moment to glance up at the sky. “Gonna be a storm, soon,” he announced. He didn’t know that, but he hoped to spur Woobun into completing the task, and keeping his poking, prodding, and muttered observations for the autopsy, where such things belonged.

Together, they managed to get the corpse, in all its pieces, into the body bag, and then the rest of the on-scene officers loaded it into the ambulance, to be taken to Woobin's morgue in North side. The crime scene investigators went on combing the scene for anything out of the ordinary, with the understanding that all would be lost after the first good snowstorm (Damyang was well-known for its storms). Doyoung, gathered, from a few murmured comments that they had not found anything that appeared to be significant.

He stripped off his gloves and made his way over to the gaggle of police officers who were standing around the coffee thermos, hoping that someone might give him a ride back into town. Woobin was lecturing the officers on what sort of perpetrator they might be looking for.

“… Something real fucked up,” was the best he had to explain, in terms of motive. “Can’t say for sure until I get it on the table, but at this point, looks like it was disemboweled still alive— that’s where the fucker took all organs out, would’a bled like you wouldn’t believe, and the act sure as fuck wasn’t done here— and then, looks like the arms and legs were cut off later, post-mortem, maybe to make it easier to move—” To a one, the officers all looked like they would rather not hear this. Woobin didn’t seem to notice. “Can’t tell you shit about the motive— see this kinda thing, we tend to think just a goddamned psycho— but I’ll say this: he knows his way around a carving knife, and he knows how to take meat apart. I’m gonna guess— given these parts— he’s probably a hunter, does up his own kills.”

“Well, that’s just about everyone in town,” Mr. Jang said grudgingly. Doyoung wondered idly if the police chief was thinking of the stag’s head he had dragged into the office to mount in the break room just back in October. It still stank of the taxidermist’s.

“How long’s he been out here?” Minhyuk asked Woobin, somewhat dubiously.

“Can’t have been much more than a day,” Woobin answered. “It doesn’t look like the scavengers got to it at all. I gotta say, I’m surprised it was found as soon as it was. This kind of thing… dumped in the woods like this… usually you don’t find nothing but a couple bones here and there, ten years after the fact, if that at all.”

“Yeah, well, we got quite the hiking industry,” Minhyuk pointed out, referring to the tourists who had found the body at dawn. Their vacation was probably quite thoroughly ruined, Doyoung thought, just as Woobin eyes lit up on him.

“You don’t talk half as much as my assistant,” he said brightly. “What was your name again? If you ever want a job in North side…”

“I don’t,” Doyoung said shortly, and Woobin laughed heartily. He hadn’t told the man his name, and didn’t intend to.

“Yeah, it ain’t the most pleasant of work,” Woobin admitted jovially. “Cleaning up after serial killers.”

•••

He texted Hyunjin when he got back into the office, asking her what she wanted to do for dinner; she suggested sushi. His stomach was feeling somewhat uneasy around its lunch contents, but he agreed. His supervisor let him go an hour later than he had estimated, due to the considerable paperwork that accompanied a murder, and the fact that no one knew much of anything about how to file it. The last murder in Damyang had been in 1998, when one tourist drunkenly stabbed another with a army knife.

By the time he walked out the door, the body had been identified: one named Byungho who had gone missing from Seoul back in September, and Byungho had come for the summer hiking; his disappearance had been presumed an accidental death. No one said it, but that was a matter of some consternation; outside of the usual heart attacks and people dying in their homes after a long battle with cancer and chemo, the accidental deaths of hikers disappearing into the woods was one of the more common ways to go in Damyang. It was all well and good to assume that they got lost and died of exposure, or met a bear in the woods, but it was another matter entirely if hikers were being murdered.

Doyoung was in a rush by the time he got behind the wheel of his car to head out to Geurimaldi’s Resort. For a long, precious moment, it seemed as though his car was going to refuse to start. It had belonged to his aunt once, and it was easily twice his age; it had been abundantly clear, even back in high school, that if the car possessed any spiritual desire at all, it was to not spend any more time in the world of the mechanically living. It had been spray-painted a truly peculiar shade of forest green, long before Doyoung had ever laid eyes on it and it only did 45 mph on it best day, which was fine, as the speed limits in town never got to be more than 35 mph, though Doyoung was likely the only resident, citizen or tourist, who obeyed those limits. He understood that if he were to attempt to drive on the highway, he would probably die.

At Geurimaldi’s, and later than ever, he parked and rushed inside, certain that Hyunjin had been waiting for him for the better part of an hour, only to find her in her usual place at the entrance of the restaurant, smiling and greeting the guests who walked in. She smiled at him in turn, and it only looked a little strained. “Kim’s late,” she explained. “But she just texted me to say that she’ll be here in fifteen minutes. You want me to get you some bread or something while you wait?”

“No, I’m good,” he said. “I’ll wait outside.”

November in Damyang came with the understanding that the outdoors should be appreciated, from the bare, withered brown landscape, to the ease of stepping outside without having to find one’s way around patches of ice three inches thick and snow as deep as one’s thigh. In a matter of days or weeks, the first real snow would come, and after that, they would be buried, straight until April.

In spite of such thoughts, he wasn’t entirely sure he shouldn’t return to the inside warmth of Geurimaldi’s. It was growing all the more brisk by the moment, and he had fished neither his winter coat nor his winter boots out of the closet yet. The wind cut through him as if his jacket were nothing but paper and his socks and tennis shoes were still coated in the dirt of Byungho’s improvised grave.

He wandered one way and that, along the front of the building. Anywhere one looked from Geurimaldi’s Resort, from the best rooms in the towers overhead, to the receiving area at the ground, one could see breathtaking views of the mountains, capped in icy white above the tree line and thick forests below. The sky overhead was a giant expanse of cloudless blue. All was still and quiet, and Doyoung felt that he could think here, in a way that he had never felt in any of the cities he had lived in. He leaned against one of the pillars and tipped his head back, closing his eyes.

He didn’t want to think about Byungho, disemboweled, dismembered, and deposited in the woods. He didn’t want to wonder what sort of secret Damyang hid that might explain such a crime; he already knew about one grim secret, and it was plenty dark enough without any additional murders.

“Well,” a voice drawled, sharp enough and familiar enough to jolt him back to himself. “I should hardly believe my eyes, but what do we have here?”

He whirled around, and found himself face to face with Victoria .

It was in the midst of staring at her, open-mouthed like an idiot, that he realized that Hyunjin was about to walk out the door and join them, and while there would always be hell to pay with the Seo family, he didn’t really want to find out what their reaction might be to that particular friendship. “Vic,” he said dumbly, and then, even more stupidly, “What are you doing here?”

Her eyebrows went up at that. She looked just the same as she always had, beautiful, from the dark make-up around her eyes to the black wool coat tied tight at her waist. Her hair was piled on her head in a messy dark bun, which was something of a departure from the knotted braids and scarves of the early twentieth century, when he had seen her last. She was slightly taller than him, and to guess from the look on her face, she was not inclined to like him any better now than she ever had before, and previously, she had always despised him.

“Why, Doyoung,” she said. “What do you think I’m doing here? Presumably, just the same as what you’re doing here.”

“Uh,” Doyoung said, and then blurted out, before he could stop himself, “Is he here yet?”

She smiled, tightly and humorlessly. She gave the distinct impression of having had a perfectly fine day, until she came across him. “Did he really give you so little in the way of power that you can’t even smell his nearby presence or lack thereof?” Doyoung flushed; they both knew the answer to that question. “No, he’s not here yet. I expect him by the end of the week, as I’m sure you’re delighted to hear. I know you’re so looking forward to a reunion.”

For all her sarcasm, for all her understood threats and underlying viciousness, for all that fear settled in the pit of his stomach, Doyoung realized, horribly, that it was true: he was looking forward to seeing Johnny.

“Great,” he mumbled, and then, a bit weakly, “Are you staying at Geurimaldi’s?”

“Of course,” she said. “Only the best for the lot of us.” She paused, and pretended not to notice his nervous glance back at the doorway. “I should warn you,” she began delicately, immediately recapturing his attention; Victoria had never before had any reason to warn him of anything. “Johnny is… somewhat upset with you.”

“I figured,” Doyoung said dryly. “He was shouting at me the last time I saw him.”

“Not about that,” Victoria said. “About how you threw yourself out of a window. Remember that?”

Doyoung glanced back at the door; no sign of Hyunjin. “Oh,” he said, and then, “Was he a bit angry about that?”

“What do you remember?” Victoria demanded.

“Not much,” Doyoung said. “Just… jumping.” And your face, he thought, and everyone else’s face, staring up at me like they couldn’t believe I would actually do it.

“You thank your stars if that’s all you remember,” Victoria said primly. “It was the worst thing I saw until the Great War. You were a mess, half turned inside out as you were, all over that driveway, and worst of all, you didn’t die. You just lay there, guts everywhere, eyes open, choking on your breath— and you know what we did? We waited. It was hours.” She shook her head in disbelief.

Doyoung took a great, struggling breath, as the memories of Byungho, not ten hours gone by, swarmed him. “Excuse me,” he announced modestly. He turned away and quite simply vomited onto the cement.

“Oh, disgusting!” Victoria said angrily, as if he had meant to offend her (not that he was too upset about doing so), and she turned away, striding for the door. She was not quick enough; Hyunjin rushed out at just that moment, her coat thrown haphazardly on over one shoulder, purse in hand, blue hair in disarray, and ran straight into Victoria.

Doyoung’s heart sank.

Victoria froze. “Hyunjin,” she breathed. She turned back to look at Doyoung, and then Hyunjin again, and it dawned on her. “What in all the world— don’t tell me you two are friends?”

“Doyoung—” Hyunjin rushed over to him, with barely a glance at Vic. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said hoarsely. “Just having a bad day.”

Hyunjin sent a spiteful look at Victoria, as if this were all her fault, and grabbed his arm, hurrying him away and to his car. Victoria stood precisely where she was, watching after them, as if frozen in disbelief.

Whatever repercussions would be visited upon him, Doyoung thought, he’d deal with it later.

•••

Hyunjin decided that sushi was not an option after all, and Doyoung agreed. They returned instead to Doyoung’s loft, where she insisted on making him tea while he flipped through his small collection of take-out menus. As long as he wasn’t thinking about the ruin of Byungho, he found he was quite hungry.

“Vic was always such a pill,” Hyunjin declared coolly, pouring the kettle of boiling water over the raspberry tea she had bought for him for his birthday. “What is the point of tormenting you like that?”

He did not want to talk about Victoria. “Hyunjin,” he began. “That hiker, the one they’re saying was killed by a bear? It was a murder.”

Hyunjin paused at that, and set down the kettle. “That’s what they’re saying at the police station?” she asked.

“That,” he said steadily. “And I was there, on scene, today. I was filling in for the coroner’s assistant.”

“No wonder you’re sick,” she said quietly, passing him the steaming mug. “Do I want to know any details?”

He shook his head. “It was bad,” he said. “But… I wanted to ask you… do you think this could have anything to do with the Gods?”

It was a very long moment before she answered. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I doubt he’s coming awake at night like some Transylvanian vampire to slaughter the tourists, I’ll say that much. But…” She hesitated. “Did you hear that Jisoo was taken down to the hospital in North side?”

“Jisoo?” It took Doyoung a moment to remember her as the waitress at the tourists’ favorite pizza place, Jisoo's Pies. “What happened?”

“Apparently she got up in the middle of the night— sleepwalking, that is— and found herself a pair of scissors and cut off all of her toes and most of her fingers at the first joint. She’s in the mental hospital now, I should clarify that. My friend said she screamed like a murder when she came to.” Hyunjin passed him a cup of tea, and frowned. “I think— I don’t know— but I think he might be… whispering.”

Doyoung didn’t answer. Sleeping gods, he thought, were sometimes worse than when awake. In his admittedly limited experience, there was precious little subtlety to a conscious god.

“But then again,” Hyunjin added, “If we had the makings of a cult, here in Damyang, I think we would know about it.” She turned her mug back and forth between her hands. “Is Johnny here in town?”

“Not yet,” Doyoung said. “Vic said he was coming.”

“He won’t be the only one,” Hyunjin guessed. She sat down next to him at the kitchen table, moving his dog -eared copy of Caroline B. Cooney’s The Face On The Milk Carton with only the briefest look of judgment. “There must be all manner of monsters coming from all over to witness the waking. Angels, demons, maybe witches or djinnis…”

“Maybe one of them murdered the hiker,” Doyoung said, following her train of thought. He rubbed his eyes. “That does make some sense.”

“Mm hmm.” Hyunjin paused. “Can’t you just… leave? Take the car and drive away until this has all blown over, or at least until after solstice?”

“I’m sure he would make me regret that,” Doyoung said dryly. “I tried running from him in Scotland, and it didn’t get me anywhere.” He gave her a smile, one that felt weak. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”


	2. Chapter 2

Lee Hyunjin, called Hyunjin, and Kim Dongyoung, called Doyoung, had not started out as friends.

Doyoung moved to Damyang in the summer before starting high school. His mother, though dead in the ground by then, had been the first to talk of it. They lived in Bichido, where Doyoung was entirely unaccustomed to the cold, or at least the cold of the likes of Damyang. Beginning sometime the year before, Doyoung's mother had dreams every night, of a beautiful place in Damyang that seemed to be calling to her. A place with mountains and streams, and a sky big enough to breathe in, a resort town that looked just like a Christmas village on a postcard. Her dreams gave her the name, and she began researching Damyang on the internet every day at work. At first, she told her son that she only wanted to visit, even though it was well outside what they could afford.

Even at that age, Doyoung knew what he was. He didn’t know, then, what was in Damyang, but he knew that his life would be arranged around paths that led him to Johnny, whether he liked it or not. At first, he tried to convince his mother against relocating to Damyang, but eventually, he found it was better to be silent.

Not long after she had decided to pack up and move, there was a car accident, wherein a drunk truck driver barreled into them on the highway. Doyoung lived; his mother did not.

Upon his release from the hospital, he went to live with his aunt Misoo in a town near Damyang. Misoo had recently finished her latest round of chemo, and was declared in remission, for now. Within a month, she began having the dreams.

They moved into a small cottage on the outskirts of town. Doyoung was constantly uneasy, wondering just what secret this small town held; as of yet, there was no sign of devil nor demons (except for himself, he supposed, as the minion of a devil), nor angels nor witches nor anything else. He kept himself alert and wary all the same. Meanwhile, the neighbors were kind enough to him, given that he was a peculiar misfit of a teenager, and his aunt’s health seemed to improve in the good mountain air.

On his first day of high school, he was determined to be nonplussed. He kept his copy of Garth Nix’s Castle (the second of the Seventh Tower books) in his school bag for some sense of security, and did not make the slightest attempt at befriending any of his peers. He was completely ignored on the bus, as they were far more interested in reuniting with friends or, more likely, their iphone, than they were in bullying any newcomers. He found his locker, and then even his first classroom, all before bell rang, and all without any of the disasters, expected or unexpected, that he thought might accompany high school.

He found a seat in his first class ( World History), in the far left of the classroom, so as to not be noticed by the teacher, but not so far in the back that he would look like he was trying not to be noticed. He sat down, and then he saw her.

She was sitting in the seat diagonally in front of his, and as all he saw of her was her back, he didn’t immediately recognize her. She had hair spilling in a tangled mess over her shoulder, pulled back from her face with butterfly clips and a single ragged blue bow. She was very thin, and, as caught Doyoung’s attention, she was not moving. Her shoulders had drawn themselves up to a stiff tension that was so pronounced that even Doyoung noticed it. To judge by the knots growing in her shoulders, she had recognized him too, and she wasn’t exactly thrilled to see him.

Doyoung let out a breath in a huff, and smothered the urge to lean forward and pinch her. At least, he thought, he now had a good idea of just what secret Damyang held.

At the introduction games, Hyunjin was called to the front of the room first, and there she stood, a small figure before the chalkboard, awkward, youngish, uncomfortable, and (as she had always been, in every past life of her own) devastatingly beautiful. She smiled, briefly, at the room, and she didn’t look at Doyoung, not once. “I’m Lee Hyunjin,” she said. “And I’m fourteen. My favorite revolution is the French Revolution— the one with Marie Antoinette,” she added hastily at the frown from their teacher, Mrs. Kim. “And the place I would love to visit is Reykjavík, in Iceland.”

Doyoung was called up not long after her, one of the last students in the room to present himself. “Hello,” he announced when standing in front of the chalkboard, staring at almost twenty students who stared back, dull and hostile. All except for one: Hyunjin, no longer pretending to be unable and unconcerned with looking at him, now glared openly with a breathtaking sort of viciousness. It was her, and her presence, that prompted him to say, “My name is Kim Dongyoung but everyone calls me Doyoung,” even though no one had ever called him Doyoung before in his life— not this life, anyway. He grinned sheepishly at the nickname, and some of the students laughed. At that, his anonymity was promptly ended, as everyone remembered a kid named Doyoung.

“I’m fourteen,” he continued. “My favorite revolution is the Velvet Revolution, and the place I’d love to visit… is…” He hesitated. Ordinary answers came to his mind: the Yellowstone Volcano, the temples of Cambodia, the North Pole. Instead he said, “The ruins of Helike,” to see if Hyunjin’s glare could intensify: it did.

In later years, he would look back at that moment and wince. In later years, Hyunjin would laugh it off. “You were fourteen,” she would say. “And we were such morons.”

As he walked back to his desk, he imagined the dust being cleared from a game board, the lines being drawn, and the gauntlet thrown. There was an understanding between them, Doyoung and Hyunjin. They were two bit parts in a game that was much larger than themselves, two small pawns, each with little to no power of their own, used and abused at the wills of merciless masters. But here, at Damyang High school, they were the only two members of this game who were present, and they would play, if only with each other. They had between them a hatred and a war that had gone on for millennia (Hyunjin) and centuries (Doyoung), and now, they would bring it to high school.

For the first few months, it seemed as if everything would go precisely according to plan.

Doyoung began with pranks, and Hyunjin responded in turn. He placed a garter snake in her locker; it bit her when she pulled out her Poems of Korean Literature textbook. Hyunjin retaliated by stealing all of Doyoung’s homework assignments for Mathematics  (she was the classroom assistant, and tasked with collecting their assignments every day), which very nearly resulted in him failing. After a few more pranks, laziness settled in, and then they discovered Facebook and cyber bullying.

Doyoung couldn’t remember who had started bullying whom on the Internet, except that she had friended him only hours after he had (against the express wishes of his aunt) created a Facebook page. He suspected that they had started doing it mostly because cyber bullying was constantly in the news, and it seemed like a natural, to say nothing of easy and lazy, way to continue their war.

They went back and forth with all kinds of nasty messages to each other. Doyoung took particular relish in describing back to Hyunjin whatever her particular awkward moment of the day was in vivid and only occasionally embellished detail, complete with the description of what everyone else had thought, and what they had said about her. She was so very awkward, which made it easy.

Hyunjin returned in kind, commenting on all the terrible things he’d done, the terrible things he was privy to, most of which was just some distorted version of the various things Johnny had done, which she thought he had been a part of. He had, she said, a hand in murder, corruption, theft, plague, and so much more.

He responded in turn, telling her that she had her own share of blame for Helike.

She went on about how the boys had cornered him in the bathroom, and bloodied his nose and mouth, and then one of them had pissed on his face and ultimately made him cry— all of which had happened, and apparently, even Lee Hyunjin knew about it, to say nothing about the rest of the school.

He stopped in front of her desk that next day (it was December by then), and leaned down, as if he was going to speak to her. Instead, he spat into her hot chocolate and moved on.

So on, until one day.

It was a week or so into winter break, and Doyoung had neither seen nor spoken to her (verbally or electronically) since the end of the school year. When he logged onto Facebook, more for boredom’s sake than anything else, the social network was kind enough to notify him of Hyunjin’s birthday, which led to him clicking on her Facebook page.

He had no real idea why he did it— maybe just because he hadn’t seen her in a few days, and was curious as to how she had been doing. There, he found posting after posting of viciousness, accusing her of blowing just about every boy in school— including himself, which he found at least slightly galling. As Doyoung scrolled through her history, he realized that much of this was coming from people he thought were Hyunjin’s friends.

Doyoung had no idea if Damyang High school was an average high school— Damyang was an isolating sort of town, after all, and he didn’t trust the depictions on television, so he didn’t have much to compare it to. But in Damyang, passions ran strong, hatred ran deep and mercurial, and the students abused one another with relish, while their teachers and guardians looked on at activities that they referred to as bullying, activities which were unambiguously illegal when they happened outside of high school, and did little.

He went to bed that night without answering Hyunjin’s usual vicious message, and he didn’t answer it in the morning, either. In class on the first day after break, he was still distracted, so distracted that he wasn’t keeping his usual tabs on Hyunjin.

He found himself looking up from his desk to see a group of them— three girls — crowded around Hyunjin. She looked as if she were about to start crying or screaming, and Lee Minyoung looked like rage personified.

Lee Minyoung was asking Hyunjin if she was okay with it when Mingyu fucked her, or was she blackout drunk, and did that mean she was going to hang herself in her closet like all those girls on the news?

In the T.V. shows, bullies usually looked like they were enjoying themselves when they tormented their victims, Doyoung thought, but Minyoung looked like nothing of the sort. Whatever was between her and Hyunjin, it had resulted in a fury, and a hatred, that put several actual demons to shame. And suddenly, he was up, out of his desk, and moving towards Minyoung.

He wasn’t sure what drove him. Maybe it was that whenever he bullied Hyunjin, he knew she could retaliate in kind, and there was a sort of peculiar equality there. Maybe it was that he knew that she had been raped, before. Maybe it was the look of devastation on Hyunjin’s face. Maybe it was just that it was one thing for him to victimize her, and another thing when Lee Minyoung did it.

“Minyoung,” he said, a bit more loudly than he had intended, and her head snapped up. “You’re being a cunt, you know that?”

Her face went blank, more out of shock than any real objection at the word. “What are you…” she started.

“Go back to your desk,” he said. “And don’t ever fucking talk to her again. Don’t message her, don’t post anything, nothing. Go.”

She did— not because he told her to do so, but because their teacher had just walked into the room. Hyunjin stared at him, open-mouthed, while Doyoung, in turn, retreated to his own desk, and quietly fumed.

He had no illusions about his outburst silencing Minyoung, or anyone else. It would take more than that. But it seemed to him that he should be able to do it.

Doyoung, after all, was not Hyunjin. Hyunjin was the long lost love of a dead god, an immortalized ingenue, and horrendously both fragile and mortal. Doyoung was just as fragile and mortal as she was, but he had a very different role in this than Hyunjin.

Doyoung was a devil’s minion. Involuntarily, perhaps, unhappily, certainly, and without any real power of his own— but he was a devil’s minion, nonetheless, and he could out-horrible a few fucking high schoolers if he put his mind to it. So he told himself, and so he went out to prove.

He was methodical. He began by printing screenshots of the various Facebook postings, making a list of names, and then distributing the copies into the lockers of the posters. He figured it put their minds in the right place, and then he started his pranks. He had any number of tricks; he broke into lockers and spilled red ink in their backpacks or on their gym clothes; placed needles in their gym shoes; slipped photos of roadkill into their textbooks; smashed their projects in wood shop, or hid them one day and then returned them the next with the parts slightly loosened. He called their cell phones from school, again and again, and left messages produced by rubbing a candy wrapper on the phone. It took some time for the pranks to sufficiently creep anyone out, and more time still for the rumor to go around that this was in retaliation for their treatment of Hyunjin, but as soon as it did get around, things changed almost overnight.

Most of the would-be bullies went silent almost immediately, or at least absent from Hyunjin’s Facebook page.  

Hyunjin stopped Doyoung after school. “Walk home with me,” she ordered, though she lived in the main part of town, and he lived far outside of it.

“Fine,” he said, putting enough irritation into his voice to be sure that she knew that he wasn’t doing this because he wanted to. If he were to be honest with himself, he hadn’t given her much thought in the last two months; he’d been so busy tormenting her bullies, inventing and executing schemes, that he’d rather forgotten who he was doing it for. If he had thought anything, it was that he and Hyunjin would go back to their usual antagonism once he had some time to spare for composing mean Facebook messages.

“I know it was you,” she started. He said nothing. Hyunjin, unlike everyone else, knew that he was capable of any number of sins, including but not limited to dismembering a rabbit and terrorizing his peers. “And I was afraid, when you started, and people stopped talking to me, that I’d be left all alone, and it’d be… like… even worst than, you know, them being mad at me one moment and friends with me the next. But now, here we are, and… you know, it’s fine. It’s better than fine. It’s nice. I feel better.”

“Sure,” Doyoung said. He considered pointing out that she seemed to be too awkward to even spit out a complete sentence, but he decided against it. He did, however, have some experience in how solitude could be an improvement on torment. Before he even knew he was going to speak, he heard himself say,

“I don’t have any demonic powers or anything— Johnny never gave me any. I couldn’t trigger an avalanche even if I wanted to.”

“I know,” Hyunjin repeated. “I… you know why I’m here, in Damyang?”

“Something to do with that… with the Gods,” Doyoung said, confidently and then lamely.

She nodded. “He’s sleeping under the earth,” she said quietly. “Somewhere, here, in the mountains.” Every hair on the back of Doyoung’s neck stood on end. “Asleep, or dead, but there’s still some sort of… awareness. A sense. If you will.”

“I don’t understand why you did it,” she said again. “Why you made them stop bullying me. That was what I wanted to ask you.”

“I dunno,” he said automatically. “I just… I saw it on Facebook, and then I saw Minyoung, and I just… I was furious.” He paused. “Why did she hate you so much, anyway? Was she jealous of you?”

“No, she wasn’t jealous,” Hyunjin said. “We were friends, but then she’d start bossing me around and making fun of the things I said, and then I’d get mad and snub her and go off with other without her, and then… I don’t know, we just got so mad at each other, and things got out of control. We’re in all the same classes, and we have— had— all the same friends, and our parents are still friends, and we just couldn’t get away from each other, you know?”

Not really, Doyoung thought, but didn’t say.

She sent him a look from underneath her eyelashes. “Let’s go out for hot chocolate this weekend,” she declared.

They became friends after that, though it was an uneasy sort of friendship, more of necessity than mutual affection. Few people would so much as talk to Hyunjin, and before her, Doyoung had very few friends who would even acknowledge him in public. 

They became true friends when Doyoung explained to Hyunjin the story of how he had come to work for Johnny, to her utter horror. It would be another year, at least, before he told her about his own relationship with Johnny, but once she knew the circumstances of that beginning, everything changed.

***

On Saturday, which Doyoung had off work and Hyunjin did not, Doyoung once again drove to Geurimaldi’s to pick her up.

“Have you seen any more of them?” Hyunjin asked, almost immediately, climbing into the car while clutching her scarf close to her neck. It was getting colder. “Johnny's group, I mean.”

“Nope.” He didn’t really want to, either.

“I think I saw a group of maenads staying at Geurimaldi’s— the ones who used to worship the Gods,” Hyunjin said. “But it might’ve just been a group of tourists.”

“I thought the Scourge took care of all the maenads,” Doyoung said, trying to keep his tone light to disguise any dismay.

“Oh come on, like anything would completely wipe them out.” Doyoung had to acknowledge the truth of that.

“You know who else we’ve got?” she added. “Dong Sichenv— the saint, that is. Everywhere he goes, lily of the valley pops up where his feet were a second ago, growing in the carpet and everything. The new manager just about had a conniption— he thought we were playing a prank on him.”

“What about Yura?” Doyoung asked. “Do you think she’ll be here?”

They had never actually discussed Yura before, for all that the witch had played a quite prominent role in both of their pasts.

Hyunjin paused. “I heard that she died in London, in the Blitz. After your last life.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. Technically, Yura was an enemy of his, but technically, everyone in Doyoung’s past was an enemy in some way or another, and after a while, he had to start designating some of them to greater or lesser priority when it came to keeping grudges. For all intents and purposes, Yura was forgiven for the wrongs she had done him.

“Well,” Hyunjin said. “A witch like Yura… you never really know for sure that they’re dead, do you?”

Doyoung turned into the main part of town, and his car huffed, and faltered, as if the turn had caught it totally by surprise. For a moment, they tipped precariously, and Hyunjin grabbed at her seat. “Doyoung,” she said severely. “I know you have enough in the bank to buy a new car.”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to do that,” he lied.

They were almost at Mrs. Kay’s Thai Sushi Candy Café and Garden, when Doyoung’s cell phone went off. Hyunjin, who would not let him talk on the phone while driving, answered it for him, and then put it to her shoulder. “It’s someone from work,” she said.

“What?” he said blankly. No one from work ever called him, weekend or not.

“He said it was about ‘the Byungho boy’.”

Doyoung pulled into the nearest parking lot, and took the phone from her.

It was Minhyuk, who was apparently working the case. “Do we have a file of all the disappearances in Damyang somewhere in the office?” the police officer asked.

“Um— yeah. We’ve got one that’s people from Damyang who went missing, and then one that’s people who went missing from the town. They’re both organized by year, and they’re on the computer…” He talked to Minhyuk through the process of finding the computer files— which was far more difficult than it needed to be, given Minhyuk's general incompetency when it came to computers— and then awkwardly wished the man a happy weekend before hanging up.

Afterwards, he revved up the car again, which huffed a great deal before the engine decided to work, and started down the remaining block to the restaurant.

“Doyoung,” Hyunjin said slowly. “I looked up a picture of Byungho on the Internet.”

Doyoung blanched. “You saw some of the crime scene photos? They’re online?” He didn’t know what kind of administrative work was involved in cleaning up a security breach of that sort, and he didn’t really want to find out. He would’ve thought that Damyang and North side’s police forces together, made up primarily of luddites, would be far too behind on technological advances to have to worry about a leak to the Internet.

“No, I saw a regular picture of Park Byungho. Like the kind they put on the ‘Missing’ posters. And,” she added, the point she was apparently determined to get to, “He looked just like you.”

Doyoung opened his mouth, and then closed it. For a good moment, his concentration was spent on steering his recalcitrant car into a parking spot without any accidents happening. When he was finally parked, and killed the engine, he turned to Hyunjin. “I noticed that at the time… well… as much as he still looked like anyone. But what’s your point?”

“I don’t know,” Hyunjin said, but she looked deeply troubled. “It scared me.”

“I’m not that unusual looking,” Doyoung pointed out.

“You’re not that ordinary looking either,” Hyunjin said.

“What do you think? That some serial killer has a type that I fit?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have no idea. I just want you to be careful.”

Mrs. Kay’s Thai Sushi Candy Café and Garden was the creation of a millionaire’s eccentric widow, the aforementioned Mrs. Kay. It was located on the second story, over Street’s Ski and Snowboarding Equipment and Rental, which justified the tourist pamphlet’s dubious claims that the restaurant was a ‘hidden gem’ of Damyang. The restaurant claimed that the fish was freshly killed daily, despite the fact that they were a more than negligible distance from the ocean, and the produce was shipped in each and every morning, which was probably just as questionable a claim. Nonetheless, the sushi was delicious, the desserts were assorted glass bowls of candy, and they had only gotten food poisoning a handful of times, so Doyoung and Hyunjin rather liked the place.

“Why do you suppose he’s here?” Hyunjin asked, after they had ordered. Doyoung had requested a Dancing Lady roll and a tuna sashimi rose, with a grilled beef pad thai salad and a blood orange San Pellegrino, while Hyunjin got a Forgotten Rainbow roll, a Murderous Spider roll, two salmon sushi pieces, and a purple bubble tea.

“You mean the God?” They were not in the habit of calling the god by his proper name; that was a dangerous thing to do, even for Hyunjin, and especially for Doyoung. Ultimately, they were not in the habit of talking about him at all. She nodded. “You would know better than I would,” Doyoung said. “Why Damyang? I always thought he had sort of an affinity for the seas— Mediterranean, Red, Black, Dead, et cetera.”

“I was of the impression that he didn’t come here of his own volition— rather, that someone laid him down,” Hyunjin said, raising her eyebrows in a rather pointed manner.

Doyoung understood what she was implying. “It can’t have been the twins,” he said. “They haven’t agreed on which way was up since before Rome, and neither of them has the power to do something like that on their own.”

“It’s been a long time since your last life,” Hyunjin pointed out. “You never know what might’ve changed.”

Before Doyoung had a chance to answer her, his cell phone rang again.

Twice in one night, Doyoung thought, was probably a new record. He had no family to speak of, the Wards only used phones for emergencies and when he called them, and his friends never called when they could text instead.

He didn’t recognize the number, but on the off-chance that it was Minhyuk again, he answered it. “Hello?”

“Heya, hyung. It’s been too long,” the voice on the other end crooned, and Doyoung immediately considered hanging up.

Hyunjin must have seen his expression, because she fixed him with a look. “Is it him?” she asked.

“Jaehyun,” Doyoung said, more for Hyunjin’s benefit than his.

“Doyoung hyung,” Jaehyun answered. “Have you missed me?”

Doyoung had hated Jaehyun in his first life, hated him badly enough to act on that hatred, and not wisely at that. He had since lost much of the élan of his hatred, for all that he had not become any fonder of the bastard, and Jaehyun himself did not like Doyoung any better in return.

“What do you want?” Doyoung asked.

“Don’t you want to know how I got your number?” Jaehyun purred.

“No. I’m going to hang up now.”

Jaehyun laughed. “You’ve got a bit more of a spine these days, don’t you? I guess this is what comes of Johnny hyung giving you something important to do. It all goes to your head in a matter of—”

Doyoung did hang up.

“Are you sure that was a good idea?” Hyunjin asked.

He shrugged, watching the phone ring and ring, as the waiter delivered their food. Finally, it stopped, and a moment later, the voicemail app lit up.

Doyoung played it. After a heavy moment of silence, Jaehyun said: “All right, fine hyung. On Monday, at 9:00 PM, get your sorry ass to Geurimaldi’s Resort, the Pioneer Suite. Johnny hyung will be there, and I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you what the consequences will be if you decide to be elsewhere.”

Jaehyun paused, and Doyoung could hear him breathing heavily into the phone. “Of course, I personally have nothing against seeing Johnny hyung skin you alive, so by all means, do whatever the fuck you like.” At that, the message cut off.

“He’s such a blustering fucking moron,” Doyoung announced, quite a bit more loudly than he had intended; the waiter shot him a dirty look, and he lowered his voice. “And that’s the kind of asshole who gets demonic powers. What kind of world is this?”

“Are you jealous?” Hyunjin asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Of course I’m jealous,” Doyoung said. “If I had demonic powers, I’d summon up an elemental to make my car run smoothly. And an imp to do all the housecleaning for me. Oh, and I’d start turning pieces of paper into counterfeit money so that I never had to work again a day in my life.”

Hyunjin shoved a piece of sushi into her mouth to keep from saying anything. Doyoung looked down at his sashimi rose and started picking it apart, petal by petal with his chopsticks. “Are you working on Monday?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said.

“Can you call in sick?”

She frowned. “I could… but so long as they’re staying at Geurimaldi’s, I doubt I’ll be able to avoid them completely. Not unless they never peek inside the restaurant. Besides, Vic’s probably already guessed that I work there.”

“I know,” Doyoung said. “But on Monday, at least, when they’re having this reunion… maybe it’s a good idea…”

She considered him. “Are you going to go?”

“I can’t think of a good reason not to,” he said. “It would just piss him off. And so long as I’m alive, he can find me, so it would just be putting off the inevitable.”

•••

On Monday, the temperature plummeted into the mid-twenties. Doyoung drove to work with the idea of bying firewood as soon as he got home, but was utterly distracted almost the moment he stepped into the office.

The bulletin board, which was usually reserved for angry reminders to use the recycling, and that everyone needed to do their own dishes, preferably before small animals started living in the sink, had been repurposed. Now, instead, there were four large photographs laid out all in a row, and underneath each one, compiled pieces of information. Doyoung didn’t need to get too close to know what the purpose was; the last photo on the end was that of Byungho, surrounded by shots of the crime scene, and the three that came before him all had that same smiling look in the photograph that the family inevitably offered up for the ‘Missing’ posters.

Mr. Jang and Minhyuk were in a furious debate; it seemed that Minhyuk had set up this project all on his lonesome over the weekend, and Mr. Jang did not approve. “They’re just hikers who got lost in the woods,” he was shouting at Minhyuk. “For God’s sake— they’re men. Everyone knows serial killers don’t go after men.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Minhyuk returned. “Did you learn everything you know about serial killers from a goddamned crime show, Mr. Jang?”

Doyoung thought that the whole bulletin board looked like a project inspired by the methods as seen on a crime show, but he had the good sense not to get involved in this conversation. He suspected that the real issue, for Mr. Jang, was not the possibility of a serial killer but the fact that, if Damyang had one, then they were all about to find out just what lengths the Tourism Board would go to to keep Damyang from appearing to be anything but an ideal vacation spot— and no one really wanted to know that.

He made his way over to the bulletin board anyway, to take a good look at the four victims; They were aged, respectively, twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty-one, and twenty, at the times of their disappearances. 

They varied in most demographics, from race to wealth to physical build. But it was the picture of Byungho that caught Doyoung’s attention. There had been a resemblance to his own face, when the boy was dead; living, it was uncanny. Doyoung made his way to his desk, and sat down to think.

He knew better than to think it was coincidence, no more than it had been coincidence when his mother and then his aunt had started having dreams pulling them to a town where a dead god lay sleeping. But he was, he thought, ultimately insignificant. There were gods and angels and devils and demons and monsters at play in Damyang and in the Gods' waking, witches and sorcerers and long lost but reborn lovers, and he was not any of that. His role in this was little more than a cruel trick the devil Johnny had played, followed by menial servitude.

And, he amended, that last trick that Johnny had played on his twin with Doyoung as the means to the end.

He looked for Byungho's autopsy report, but Woobun hadn’t filed it into the system yet. He decided against ever telling Hyunjin about Minhyuk's theory of a serial killer, even as he wondered if perhaps Minhyuk was finding patterns where there weren’t any. Lots of people went missing in the Seoul, every year, he thought. Most of them didn’t turn up like Byungho: in several pieces.

•••

For all that he had so little to do in the last hours of work that he spent the time reading the copy of Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted that he had brought from home, he was still late getting to Geurimaldi’s. His car growled and rumbled and threatened not to start, while he tried to imagine what the reaction might be if he called back Jaehyun’s number to ask for a ride.

In the end, the engine finally came to life, and Doyoung made his way to a meeting he had been dreading since he was old enough to have conscious memories. On the drive up the mountain, the aurora borealis blazed in the sky above him like a burning ribbon, in greens and blues and breath-taking fuchsia. Doyoung enjoyed the drive, and tried not to think overmuch about what was coming after.

The Pioneer Suite was perhaps the very best suite that Geurimaldi’s had to offer, and Geurimaldi’s skimped on precious little to begin with. Damyang, after all, was a town of luxury, as a place where wealthy men came to ski and drink, and their wives came to enjoy themselves and be idle. The resorts offered every sort of spa luxury, and the best cuisine and drink that could possibly be available, given their isolation, all in a picturesque Christmas village. The nearby mountains, they boasted, had the best skiing in the country (this was not true). The Pioneer Suite offered a panorama view, of the mountains and the village, the ski slopes outlined in blue lights, the village laid out in yellow streetlights. There would be a jacuzzi in one room, a master bedroom in the room with the full windows looking out at the mountains, a full dining room, and more. But Doyoung knew all of that before he knocked on the door; Hyunjin had shown him the suite when she had first started working at Geurimaldi’s, when it was unoccupied during the summer.

Victoria opened the door and smiled down at him. “You didn’t bring your friend.”

Doyoung didn’t answer. Inside, Jaehyun was pacing, but he grinned when he saw Doyoung. “I thought you wouldn’t come hyung.” he announced, as Vic allowed Doyoung inside. “You’re late.”

Meihui was sitting at the nearby table with a moleskin notebook opened in front of her, while Mark Lee lounged on the sofa in front of the gas fireplace, totally preoccupied with his smart phone. “Long time no see!” he greeted Doyoung without looking up. Doyoung didn’t answer; he was busy surveying the room and trying to find a spot that looked like a natural place for him to be, but where he would be ignored by everyone else.

“Doyoung.” He startled when he heard Meihui say his name. She found few things interesting, after all, and least of all him. She looked up at him. Her hair was cut in a more modern pixie cut, but she was otherwise unchanged.

“I understand you’re working at the police station,” she said.

“Just as an administrative assistant,” Doyoung said automatically. He was surprised at how thin and hoarse his voice sounded; he hadn’t even realized just how frightened he was to be here until now.

“Has anything unusual happened that we should know about?” she asked, looking back down at her notebook.

He unstuck his throat. “There was a murder,” he said.

She smiled thinly, still without looking at him. “I meant something stranger,” she said. “People going suddenly mad, unexplainable lights in the sky, that kind of thing.”

He thought Jisoo's fingers and toes, but found himself feeling a sudden and strange rush; he didn’t want her to ignore him, or ignore this. Jaehyun and Vic were talking to one another, and Mark was distracted as usual. “It was— it was bad. He was found in the woods, and he was dismembered, and tortured before he was killed. He went missing a month ago.” She paused at that, slowly looking up at him. “I know there are psychos everywhere,” Doyoung said quickly. “But do you think it’s a coincidence that a month before a— before a chthonic god awakens in a small town in the middle of no where, that town has its first murder in decades, and it’s something completely brutal?”

Meihui’s face was impassive. “Sit down,” she said, finally, gesturing.

Doyoung told her only facts; no conjecture, none of Minhyuk's speculation about a serial killer, and certainly not the opinion that the victim bore an increasingly unnerving resemblance to himself. He’d given only a cursory explanation of the state the body had been in when the door opened and he heard Vic’s voice: “Sir. Welcome to Damyang.”

Doyoung’s stomach turned to lead, and he looked up.

Johnny looked surprisingly well-suited by modern clothing; jeans, a t-shirt, a coat thrown on against the cold that he didn’t feel. He did not, in Doyoung’s opinion, look like an angel or a devil; nor did he look ordinary. He had dark, black hair which he frequently neglected to cut for periods of time, until it fell into his face. He was broad-shouldered and muscled, and so tall that he towered head and shoulders over Doyoung. He never had a full beard, but he had never been particularly good at shaving every day either.

But what made Johnny himself was the dangerous, sleepy-eyed look about him. His eyes were shadowed by his brows, emphasized by dark marks that might have shown that he hadn’t slept, but that he didn’t need to sleep. Ordinarily, he looked tired, disinterested, and only the slightest bit insane. When he grew angry, however…

There was no one and nothing in all the world that frightened Doyoung like Johnny when he was angry.

“Sir—” Vic started, but he brushed past her, moving as quickly as only angels or devils could do, and Doyoung, before he had even realized he was going to move, found himself on his feet, backing away until his back hit the window.

Johnny towered over him; he had a foot’s height on Doyoung, twice the breadth of shoulder. “You little cunt,” Johnny hissed.

“I- I didn’t— I wasn’t— I— I— I—”

“Not that fucking stammer,” Johnny snapped, which helped nothing.

“Johnny,” Meihui said, in a voice that might have been meant to be calming, but betrayed more than a touch of irritation. “Really. That was all, what, a hundred years ago? It’s hardly worth getting angry about now.”

Doyoung couldn’t even make himself look up at Johnny's face, not with the terrifying, insane eyes the devil got, and the way his entire body tensed, as if he was only just barely holding himself back from striking Doyoung.

“I’m sorry!” Doyoung managed to blurt out.

“You’re fucking sorry?” Johnny repeated, his voice a low hiss. “You little fucking brat— you jumped out of a fucking window! And that after you fucking betrayed me for my fucking brother — after fucking my brother—”

“I didn’t!” Doyoung squeaked, and Johnny did strike him then. The left side of his face exploded with pain, even as he landed hard on his hands. He curled himself into a ball, his arms protectively raised over his head.

“Johnny!” Meihui shouted.

“I did what you told me to do!” Doyoung managed to blurt out, even as Johnny, crouched down to his level, grabbed his wrist and wrenched it away from his head, all the better to hit him again.

“Oh?” For a single moment, Johnny was suddenly extraordinarily calm. “Did I tell you to fuck him?”

He didn’t give me a choice, Doyoung thought, and there were tears springing into his eyes, likely from the pain of what felt like a broken cheekbone. He couldn’t say it, and it didn’t matter much if he could. Johnny already knew it perfectly well.

Suddenly, Meihui was standing at Johnny's side, poised to reach between Doyoung and Johnny if need be. Her eyes were blazing, but she sounded perfectly calm when she said, “You got what you wanted in the end, remember?” Her voice dropped in volume. “Don’t complain that you paid the shekel for it.”

Slowly, Johnny dropped Doyoung’s wrist, and drew back, up to his full height. “If you ever kill yourself again, in any life,” he promised Doyoung slowly. “In the following life, I will fillet your pathetic flesh right off your scrawny bones. Do you understand me?” Doyoung nodded. “Answer me.”

“Yes.” It was a whisper, but Johnny hearing was good enough.

Johnny turned away, and Doyoung managed to get a look up, at the others. He thought that Jaehyun and Vic might be laughing, or otherwise enjoying this, but they were not. Every one of them looked somber and pale. Mark had put away his smartphone.

“So here we are!” Johnny said, much too cheerfully. He strode a short distance away from Doyoung, until he was standing by the fireplace, near Mark. “Enemessar or En, The God, my old friend, will be returning to us— on December 21st, if I had to make a guess.” He looked at the lot of them, one by one. “Well, you’ve all been here for a few days— or more,” with a dark glance towards Doyoung. “What do you have for me?”

“The girl, Lee Hyunjin, she’s here,” Vic offered up quietly. “She was born here, according to her records.”

That was true, Doyoung thought, and she was perhaps one of only a few children to have ever been born in Damyang. She had been born in a bathtub during a snowstorm while an ambulance from North side tried and failed to reach her parents’ apartment in time. Her mother had entertained Doyoung with the story once, while Hyunjin rolled her eyes.

Johnny just nodded, as if that was so obvious that he knew it without being told, but Mark shifted and sat up. “Was she reborn because he’s awakening, or is he awakening because she was reborn?” he asked curiously.

Johnny merely shrugged. “She could make a good hostage,” Jaehyun pointed out.

Victoria seemed to debate with herself for a moment before she looked pointedly at Doyoung. “The two of them are friends.”

There was a good moment of silence, before Mark said, “You made friends with her, hyung? I thought she couldn’t stand you.” He stopped grinning the moment he saw Johnny's face.

“W-we went to- to school together,” Doyoung mumbled.

“The two sparrows flocking together,” Jaehyun drawled. Doyoung grimaced, but no one laughed.

Johnny considered that for a moment, his eyes narrowed, but he seemed to decide to dismiss the matter entirely. “Lee Hyunjin,” he said instead. “Well. Any sign of Yura, or Bjarnmothr, or Vicelun? Or any of the rest of En’s old, immortal followers?”

“None,” Meihui said. “I have sources saying that Yura was killed in the witch hunts of Prague, a few hundred years ago or so.” That, Doyoung thought, was distinctly different from Hyunjin’s information— but he wasn’t so foolish as to call attention to himself by sharing this.

“We haven’t heard anything of Bjarnmothr since before the Scourge,” Vic said slowly. “And the same for Vicelun…”

“But there are a few others who have come to witness the waking,” Mark began. “Urvashi the Apsara, as well as the Wandering Priest, Dong Sicheng is here, too— this must be the first time he’s left China in decades.”

“There are the demon hunters,” Vic added. 

“And also your twins brother, Seo Youngho,” Jaehyun said simply.

Johnny looked at Doyoung for a long moment. “And his servants, I imagine,” he said. “What else.”

“Well, the electro-psychic readings of this area have been— to put it mildly— erratic, since before I got here,” Mark said. “Which might be due to En, but might also have something to do with our proximity to Yellowstone. The biologists’ report from this summer indicated a few abnormalities: larger-than-usual frog populations, bird populations, bee populations…”

“Meanwhile, the North side Hospital has had an unprecedented number of cases since last Christmas that involve some sort of mental breakdown,” Vic said. “Most, though not all, of the patients have made a more or less full recovery.”

“There was a murder,” Meihui said. She glanced at Doyoung as if expecting him to speak, and when he said nothing, she continued. “A boy, dismembered in the woods. Some tourists found him a week ago.”

“Some follower making a sacrifice,” Johnny said dismissively. He looked down at Doyoung. “Nothing to be concerned about.”

***


	3. Chapter 3

At work, Doyoung told everyone who asked— which was everyone— that he’d gotten a black eye after accidentally opening his medicine cabinet door into his face. He wasn’t really sure that anyone believed him, as the bruise was far too big for his explanation, but it hardly mattered. No one asked him about the bruises on his wrists.

Park Byunghos’s autopsy report had been entered into the system, but Doyoung didn’t read it. He got out of work only a bit late, and went to his car to find that today, the engine simply would not start, and was totally unaffected by ever curse and threat that Doyoung hissed at it. He spent the better part of fifteen minutes trying before he finally gave up, pulled out his cell phone, and called his neighbor.

Hwang family had been his neighbors when he lived with his aunt. One afternoon, mid-way through his junior year of high school, he had come home to find his aunt on the kitchen floor, screaming in pain and clutching her head. He’d genuinely thought, at that moment, that this was something out of his own past, some sort of curse or demonic possession, but it wasn’t— it was just another ugly twist in the long road of her cancer. He’d called 9-1-1, and then, ran next door, to get Hwang family’s help.

After that, they more or less adopted him, with the quiet understanding (an understanding that Doyoung could not make himself see until she was in hospice care) that she was dying quickly, and when she was gone, Doyoung would be alone. He still ate dinner with them, every Sunday night.

When he called, Mrs. Hwang answered the phone. “I’ll send my husband over with the tow,” she promised him. “I bet he can get it fixed up in no time. Don’t you worry about it.”

He appreciated the optimism, he thought, but given his car’s age and its past history, he very much doubted that.

Doyoung and Mr. Hwang managed to tow back to his home, with Mr. Hwang doing most of the work, and Doyoung mostly getting in the way. Once there, Mr. Hwang set about investigating the problem, while Doyoung went into the kitchen to keep Mrs. Hwang company.

“What in God’s name happened to you?” she demanded, the second she saw him, black eye and all.

“I got hit with a doorknob,” Doyoung lied, with much less ease than he had to his coworkers.

“You haven’t been getting into fights, have you?” she demanded, already, unasked, making an ice pack for him. Mrs. Hwang was a tall, bony woman who looked ten years older than her age, and usually wore hand-knit sweaters and jeans, regardless of the temperature. All of her jeans bore the unmistakable signs of gardening, in grass stains and knees rubbed to nothing.

“Do I look like the kinda person who gets into fights?” Doyoung asked indignantly.

She squinted at him from behind her glasses, before she said, “If you’re still having any problems with any of those little berks from your school, I could have my husband talk to them…”

With a shotgun, Doyoung thought, which was certainly an entertaining thought, but very unlikely to end well with Johnny. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t a fight. Don’t worry about it, please.”

She fed him a bowl of kimchi stew and made him a cup of cocoa, all before Mr. Hwang stomped back into the house and admitted, in the dark tones of one who was not a good loser, that he wasn’t sure what was wrong with the car, other than that several parts needed to be swapped out.

“What parts?” Doyoung asked immediately, alarmed. Besides the fact that he doubted that any part of his car was still commonly manufactured, the acquisition of said parts was probably going to have to include admitting to some mechanic or salesperson that he knew absolutely nothing about cars, up to and including what kind of car his was.

“I’ll look around, see what we’ve got on hand,” Mr. Hwang said obliviously. “But I don’t think I’m going to get anything done tonight.”

Mrs. Hwang gave Doyoung a ride home, talking all the while about what her sons and daughters were getting up to in college and graduate school, and dropped him off in front of his building. “I’ll give you a call as soon as my husband got it fixed up,” she promised. “You sure you’re going to be all right until then?”

“I’ll walk to work,” Doyoung promised. “It’s not that far.” He waved her good night, as she drove off, and then started around the other side of the building to get inside.

He had no sooner stepped around the corner than the street light went out. Doyoung immediately went still.

Damyang was, admittedly, old by South Korean standards, but the street lights were not. They were designed, kept, and maintained by the Tourism Board, in a stylistic fashion, in an attempt to make the town just a bit more atmospherically like Christmas. They were bright and clean at all times, they never hummed, and they never, ever went out.

Standing still, in the dark, Doyoung made a decision. And then he bolted, running for the stairs.

His feet knew the way, even when he couldn’t see, and he’d just almost reached the first step when arms circled him from behind and dragged him backwards. He smelled the hint of new cigarette smoke and quite nearly panicked.

But he hadn’t been a devil’s minion for three lives for nothing; rather than struggling forward, he launched himself backwards, as much as he could, into his would-be abductor. He heard a man grunt, and then the both of them toppled to the ground. Doyoung managed to thrash his way free in the tumble, and scrambled up to his feet before bolting for the stairs.

He thought he’d curse every step as he ran up them, and himself, for choosing a loft that had a wooden, outdoor stairs, over a building that would be otherwise empty at this time of night. There was a building of condos half a block down, and a pub across the street, but he didn’t really want to find out for himself whether or not anyone would hear him screaming and come to his rescue. He never knew how he managed to get to the landing, get his keys out, and get himself inside, all with the horrendous sound of someone— something— running up the steps behind him. He slammed the door shut, and expected to hear a thud of something heavy hitting it, or the rattle of someone trying the knob, or even a knock. There was nothing. He moved through the loft quickly, turning on every light, making sure every window was locked, checking under his bed and in the closet. He expected, constantly, to hear the glass shatter of a window or a belayed knocking on the door, but there was nothing.

He considered, briefly, calling Johnny, and decided against it. To judge by their last meeting, Johnny did not feel like extending him any favors any time soon. He also considered texting Hyunjin, but dismissed that as ridiculous; there wasn’t anything she could do, and besides, he would just worry her. Calling the police was a whole other can of worms; Doyoung did not really want to give his employers any reason to look very deeply into his life.

He spent a long night huddled up in his bathroom, with a flashlight and a hammer both kept close, wondering why he had ever disdained owning a gun. Nothing happened. Whoever, or whatever, it was, seemed to be content to leave him be, so long as he was at home.

•••

Three days later, at dawn, he walked the two hour trek across and out of town to get to the Hwangs’ home. Mrs. Hwang had called him the night before to tell him with some delight that Mr. Hwang had managed to get the car running.

He arrived with just barely enough time to get to work. He turned down Mrs. Hwang's offer of a coffee, but accepted the muffin, and went out to reunite with his car.

It did not work. In increasing desperation, Doyoung tried the key again and again, but the engine only sputtered. Eventually, he went inside to tell Mrs. Hwang.

“That’s peculiar as anything,” she said, frowning. “It worked last night— my husband drove it up and down the road.”

“He took your car to work, didn’t he?” Doyoung asked, trying not to sound too pained.

She paused, at that, for only a moment before her face cleared. “Look— run down to your Aunt's old place,” she said. “Dr.  Hyungsik mentioned he was gonna be there this morning, fixing things up before this young family arrives at noon. He’ll give you a ride.”

Asking an acquaintance for a ride to work was the sort of thing that Doyoung dreaded to the point of avoiding at all costs, but just then, he didn’t have much other choice. It was perhaps a quarter of a mile’s walk in between the two cottages; Mrs. Hwang, and the one where he had spent his teenage years.

When his aunt had died, last year, Doyoung had waited only what seemed to be about the appropriate amount of grieving time before he sold the place. He’d spent most of those months sleeping over at Hyunjin’s. Suddenly, the tiny, two bedroom cottage had seemed cavernous, too empty for him to ever fill. The woods that surrounded it, which had seemed so full of adventure when they first moved in, felt as isolating as the moon. In his photo albums and his memories, he could tailor his aunt to remember her in happier days, but in the cottage, all he could think about was the cancer, and the slow and brutal way it had wrecked her.

Dr. Hyungsik had bought the property, and turned it into yet another tourist rental, this one generally advertised to families who came to Damyang for the skiing and the hiking, but couldn’t afford the big resorts. He’d fixed it up, expanded on the gardens, and Doyoung understood that he made a tidy profit off the place.

Sure enough, the doctor’s car was in the lot where his car (currently dying, or dead) had once made a home, and the doctor himself was in the yard, raking up leaves. He looked up almost immediately, having heard Doyoung’s steps in the dried leaves. “Dongyoung!” he said. “What brings you over here? Come to visit the old place?”

Doyoung didn’t have much of an opinion of Dr. Hyungsik. He understood that Dr. Hyungsik was very well-respected throughout the town, and he remembered that the doctor had been one of the first people to greet him and his aunt after their move. The doctors of the hospital in North side, where his aunt underwent several more rounds of chemotherapy, stood out far more clearly in his mind.

“Um, no,” Doyoung started awkwardly, now feeling moderately guilty for his lack of sentimentalism towards his own home, besides the general cringing of asking the doctor for anything at all. He managed to stammer out the request, followed by the explanation, and the doctor was good enough to oblige him immediately. He dropped the rake and directed Doyoung to the car, as if nothing was of greater importance to him than Doyoung’s punctuality.

To Doyoung’s relief, the doctor didn’t mention his black eye. “How old are you now?” he asked instead.

“Um. Twenty one.” Doyoung figured that they were making conversation, but he was terrible at it, and more than usual. He was fairly certain that whatever he said next, he probably shouldn’t ask the doctor’s age. The car smelled of the man’s cologne, a faint, clean but masculine smell.

“And how is it working at the police station? You’re still there, right?”

The last time Doyoung had so much as laid eyes on Dr. Hyungsik was only a few weeks after he had first started work, when a tourist had broken his neck on the slopes. The death was unfortunately timed with a blizzard that made the roads in and out of Damyang impassable, and so, Dr. Hyungsik had stepped in to do Woobin’s job for the time being. “Yes. An administrative assistant. It’s all right, I guess.”

The man grinned, briefly, and Doyoung thought his teeth looked almost alarmingly white. “All right. Well, that’s something. I heard about this hiker,” he continued. “The one killed by a bear. It’s a tragedy… to go that young…”

Doyoung blinked. “They’re still saying it was a bear?” That, he thought, didn’t seem like the kind of thing that was really legal, on the part of the radio, the Tourism Board, or the police station.

The question earned him a sharp look from Dr. Hyungsik. “It wasn’t a bear?” Doyoung hesitated, until the doctor said, “I understand. Don’t want to say anything bad about the folks you work with. It’s commendable but…” He shook his head. “Lying about a death… well, that’s quite a sin… I’ll have to have a chat with Chief Jang.”

He pulled up the police station, where Mr. Jang himself stood out front, smoking a cigarette, and Doyoung was a little less than a half- hour late. He thanked the doctor profusely for the ride, and went inside as quickly as possible, already preparing his explanation, which, in the end, no one asked for.

•••

The following morning, he heard a rumor that Dr. Hyungsik and Mr. Jang had had a talk— or, put more conventionally, that Dr. Hyungsik had taken Mr. Jang to task for lying to the general public about the circumstances of the death of a hiker. It was a matter of some contention throughout the office, between those who believed in keeping the peace at most any expense and those who advocated transparency. Doyoung came into the discussion late enough to know to keep his mouth shut.

It was dark by the time he started walking home. Between the chill getting under his jacket and the noticeable increase in tourists, including an overflow of college students at the Bar and Grill, winter was unmistakably closer. He found himself trying to remember if the day had been overcast, or if the forecast had called for approaching storms. The first snow of the season had been in early October, followed by a handful of others, but there were always false starts that covered the ground in barely more than an inch, and melted or evaporated away shortly afterwards. The next snow, he thought, would be a good, full storm, and before long, winter would an onslaught, a constant battle until March and April finally broke its hold. It was not unusual for a Damyang winter to see as much as thirty feet of snow.

Such was the topic of Doyoung’s mind, when he noticed a car pulling up alongside him.

He hesitated, tempted for a moment to bolt into a run. That temptation was not diminished when the car’s window rolled down, and Lucas stuck his head out. “Get in the car,” he ordered Doyoung.

“Uh— no. Hell no,” Doyoung said, stepping further off the road. Lucas was the first, most trusted, and most loyal of Youngho's servants.

Lucas stopped and parked the car before throwing the door open. “What do you mean no?”

“You want to take me to Youngho?” Doyoung’s voice rose dangerously. “No, no way in hell, I’m not going anywhere near—”

“I know things didn’t exactly end well between you two,” Lucas started.

“You mean when I jumped out of a window?”

There was a muscle working in Lucas' cheek. His face should have been youthful— he had only been about twenty-one when Youngho had immortalized him, Doyoung recalled— but his hair was half gray, his eyes lined, and he could have passed thirty. “He wants to see you,” Lucas said, as if he were spelling out a simple truth to an especially idiotic child.

“I got— I gathered that,” Doyoung said from between gritted teeth. “I don’t- don’t want to see him.” He took a deep breath. “You were— you were the one who— at my apartment— you grabbed —”

He was stammering too badly to spit out a full sentence, and Lucas didn’t seem to have the patience to wait for him to complete it. “What’s past is done, Dongyoung,” he said instead, insistently. The cold did not seem to have the slightest effect on him, but Doyoung was shivering almost violently.

Doyoung took another step backwards, even as Lucas stepped forward, and just when he realized that Lucas was probably not at all above tackling him and dragging him forcibly into the car, he blurted out, “Johnny will kill me if I see him. He was so— so fucking furious—”

Lucas froze. “Is that the truth?” he asked.

It was definitely possible, Doyoung thought, but to call it ‘truth’ would be a stretch. He pointed to his black eye. “He already gave me this.”

Lucas seemed to reconsider; Doyoung had a nasty suspicion that the main thing this statement changed was Lucas' estimation of how easy Doyoung would be to catch.

“You have a lot to answer for,” he said finally.

“Yes,” Doyoung said, taking another creeping step backwards. “I lied my ass off to all of you for three months. In all fairness, Caecilia maybe should have—”

“Caecilia,” Lucas said. “Left. Didn’t you know that?”

“What?”

“After you. Because of you. She left Youngho.”

Doyoung remembered Meihui’s comment to Johnny: _You got what you wanted in the end, remember? Don’t complain that you paid the shekel for it._

“Oh,” he said softly. “No, I didn’t know that.”

Lucas shook his head. “That about sums it up, doesn’t it?” he said, his voice darkly ironic. “You were a damned disaster on two feet, but you managed to breeze in and wreck everything— and all that without, by all appearances, having much more than a bit of fluff between your ears.” He smiled bitterly. “Johnny always did have a talent for finding tools in the most unlikely of objects.”

Doyoung didn’t answer.

Youngho was an angel, as Johnny had been, once, before he fell. Doyoung, though he was a devil’s minion, and incarnate three times now, did not at all know what the Rules to being an angel, or a devil, might be. He did not know how angels came into creation, and he did not know what sins constituted falling; he did not know what, or how much of, a relationship to the Hebrew God had to their existence. He did not even know if such Rules were widely known, and written in stone, or if they were a secret forgotten by all but the angels themselves, or if there were no true Rules at all but only theories made by repeated observation. Any questions he had ever asked in the past had only earned him sharp rebukes— Johnny, apparently, did not deem his minion important enough to grant such knowledge, and Youngho was not interested in sharing any secrets, not even before he had known that Doyoung was Johnny’s agent.

Whatever the case may be, Doyoung thought, he had somehow managed to get himself caught between a pair of twins, twins who hated each other with a shared passion that burned away all scruples and caution. Much as he was loathe to admit it, Lucas did seem to have the right of the situation.

A question occurred to him. “Is Youngho here because of En, or because of Johnny?” he asked as delicately as he might, taking another careful step away from Lucas. It did occur to him that Lucas might not take well to any such questions, given that Doyoung had basically spied on him and all of Youngho's household for three months as Johnny’s agent.

“For the dead god,” Lucas said dryly. “I’m sure you know about their enmity— seeing as it stretches back to before Johnny Fell.” Doyoung nodded. “Now that he’s awakening, Youngho's presence — the angelic presence— will cast a protection over this town and its inhabitants.” Lucas hesitated, for just a moment, as if considering whether or not to point out that Doyoung was one such inhabitant. “There will still be some incidents, I’m sure, but everyone should make it through, more or less sane and whole— you won’t see the whole town going raving mad when En first regains full consciousness. It’s a worrisome matter, when gods like En wake.”

The wind picked up, cutting through Doyoung’s jacket and dredging up the dead leaves at their feet. He felt a certain pang of guilt, at his own desire to have Youngho literally anywhere but Damyang, ignorant though he had been that Youngho would be the one thing preserving his peers. “Why is he here, anyway? In Korea?”

“I couldn’t say,” Lucas said wryly. “I suppose he must have wanted a rest.”

“I thought someone laid him down,” Doyoung said slowly, and trailed off.

“Well, there is that possibility. But no one’s taken credit for doing so, and these chthonic gods of such an age— they have their characteristics, and the occasional nap that lasts more than a century is one of those characteristics. Shouldn’t Johnny have told you all of this?”

Doyoung shrugged. “Yes, well, maybe. Well. Anyway.” His feet were already moving towards the road, in the direction of home. “Good talk. I mean, I’m sorry about… well… never mind.”

“One last thing,” Lucas said sharply, and Doyoung paused, ready to bolt. “Youngho will want to know if you’re still so upset that you’re likely to… act irrationally.”

Doyoung blinked. It took him a moment to translate Lucas' habit of avoiding impolitic talk into something comprehensible. “No,” he said. “I’m not gonna kill myself again.” As far as he knew, he thought, with a certain anxiety that he would never share with a follower of Youngho's. Even when he had done it, he had hardly known himself what he was going to do until his hands were on the windowsill, pulling himself up.

For one wild moment, he had the feeling that he should go with Lucas for no better reason to confront Youngho, to point out the monstrosity of what had been done, and to demand something in return— repentance, recompense, indemnity, anything— but he couldn’t bring himself to even entertain the idea. He was small, and wretched and without virtue; he was a whore who became a murderer who sold his soul for a con. He was a sinner, who could terrorize his classmates, but couldn’t stand up for himself. He didn’t deserve any better than the worst of what Youngho had done to him, and even if he did, he stammered too badly to demand it.

“I’m going home,” he said instead, and that, at least, he could stand by.

**

On Sunday, when Hyunjin had a day off, Hyunjin and Doyoung went up onto Chuwolsan Mountain, to hike.

They cut into the ski slopes and took the chairlift up. Strictly speaking, neither had a ski pass, and even if they did, supposedly no one was allowed on the chair lifts without skis or snowboard. But almost every lift was operated by old peers from high school, and there was an understanding between Damyang High school alumni, that it was them against the tourists, and that was regardless of any of the petty hatreds of high school. Thus, so long as they had once known each other, there was free skiing and snowboarding, free drinks in certain bars, and free entry to the movie theater, which only ever showed movies a month after they came out, and endless Christmas classics from October to January.

“I can’t believe he hit you,” Hyunjin said, not for the first time, just after the chairlift had lifted them into the sky.

“Why not?” Doyoung asked indifferently. His black eye had barely faded; if anything, it seemed to be spreading and getting more colorful with every passing day. “What would he have against hitting?”

“And what was he so mad about?” she demanded. “You committing suicide? Did he take it that personally?”

“Apparently.” He hesitated. “And… what his twin did…”

Hyunjin slid him a look. For a moment, her face showed only disgust, but a moment later, she looked thoughtful, as if she had realized something. “He’s jealous,” she announced.

“Jealous?” Doyoung retorted, preparing to argue this one.

“Of Youngho. He was jealous afterwards, and he was jealous before that… when you succeeded with that awful mission he gave you.”

Doyoung didn’t answer. It seemed to him, occasionally, that the chairlift offered some of the greatest isolation to be found in Damyang. There was nothing but the wind and the chill, the mountain below, and Hyunjin nearby, in her black winter coat and wild green scarf printed with birds, strands of blue hair escaping her hat.

He thought of the malice in Johnny’s eyes, almost a hundred years ago, when he told him how successful he had been. Malice, madness, and fury, and all of it an entirely unexpected reaction.

“I think I want to think that,” he said quietly.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Hyunjin answered.

At the highest point, the chairlift dropped them off. They waved to the attendee there, Jinwoo from high school, who scowled at them for not being on skis or snowboard, and set off, boots leaving little indentation in the icy, manufactured snow.

As soon as they were on the hiking trail, which lead higher up the mountain, the snow disappeared entirely, leaving only dead leaves and spots of dirty ice.

It had been a habit of theirs for years now to wander through the woods, wondering if perhaps they could find the gravesite of the sleeping god. Doyoung believed, without any real evidence to back him up, that Hyunjin would have some sense when they were nearby, a claim which Hyunjin herself found rather dubious. Hyunjin felt that there might be some sort of external marker at the spot, such as a rune-carved gravestone, or something like Stonehenge, which Doyoung doubted. By now, they did it more out of habit than any hope that they might find something.

“Is he as mad as ever?” Hyunjin asked, when the snow and the skiing area was out of sight.

“I’ve never been really sure if he’s actually mad or if he just looks like it,” Doyoung answered, but he was thinking of Johnny’s rather abrupt mood swings.

“I wonder why he’s mad and his twin isn’t,” Hyunjin mused, ignoring his comment, and Doyoung shrugged. Perhaps, he thought, it had something to do with whatever betrayal Johnny had wrought, which had lead to his Fall and the enmity with Youngho. But he didn’t even know what had happened, or what had been done. All he knew was that once, the twins were inseparable, and fought all their battles together, including those battles against the dead god. Sometime in Rome, that had changed dramatically.

Hyunjin went ahead of Doyoung, and climbed up, over a bolder in the path. She paused to gaze back at him.

“Even now,” she said. “Even after everything he’s done… are you still in love with him?”

He made a face at her. He had only ever told Hyunjin that, and no one else, throughout all three lives. At the time, he had told her because he was sixteen, it was three in the morning, and he was drunk and sleep -deprived— none of which made for good decision making. He did not particularly like to talk about it; she did.

“I’m not going to act on it,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “But I suppose that answers my question.”

“Before Johnny,” he said slowly. “I was— I was in love with Kibum. And he wasn’t much better than Johnny.” He had acted on that love, and he would never be done paying for it. He shook his head. “There’s something wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Hyunjin said awkwardly. She reached out a hand to help him climb up, over the bolder in their path. “I also know what it’s like,” she said. “To love someone who overwhelms everything that you are, and all of it against your will.”

Doyoung smiled faintly. He did not necessarily think that Hyunjin was any particularly better off, or wiser than he was when it came to romance, but he still appreciated the sentiment of not being alone.

“Did I tell you I saw Lucas?” he asked, deliberately changing the subject. “Youngho's follower. He told me that Caecilia actually did leave Youngho, after I died in my last life.”

“Caecilia,” Hyunjin repeated, in the murky tones of someone who had too many enemies to keep track of— and as all of En’s enemies were her enemies by default, that was certainly the case. “That seeress who worked for Youngho, yes? She sold her eyes for the Sight?”

“Right,” Doyoung said. “And she was his, uh, his lover— his wife, really, considering how long they’d been together. When Johnny sent me, to try to seduce Youngho… what he really wanted was to drive a wedge between the two of them.”

“Therefore depriving him of a seer, and whatever advantage that gave Youngho over him,” Hyunjin observed. “And you succeeded at this? Shouldn’t he be a bit more grateful?”

Doyoung flushed. That was hard to imagine. “Youngho must have been furious,” he said. And wasn’t that a unique position to be in, he thought; to have both twins, who hated each other, angry with him.

“He should be, with himself,” Hyunjin said cooly. She sighed. “Well— neither of the twins came here to fight, I don’t think. They came here for En. Let’s just hope they stay away from each other — and they both stay away from you.”

•••

On Tuesday, Doyoung stopped by the grocery store to gather his usual supplies; milk, eggs, assorted fruits and vegetables that still looked mostly fresh, soap, and a bundle of firewood that would only last a night or two.

He came home, turned the light on, and dropped everything when he saw a figure sitting at his kitchen table. Johnny smiled lazily at him, even as Doyoung’s heart went so fast in his chest that he saw spots in front of his eyes.

“Did I give you a scare?” the devil crooned.

“Yes,” Doyoung said from between his teeth. He looked down at the mess at his feet, of shattered bottle of milk and smashed eggs, broccoli smeared with yolk and bruised plums. He groaned.

Johnny sat back in his chair and waved his hand, even as Doyoung crouched down to try to begin cleaning the mess. Abruptly, it all sorted itself out; the broken glass and shells into the trash, the spilled milk down the sink, the cleaned vegetables and fruits into the refrigerator.

Doyoung watched, bemused, for only a moment. “What are you doing here?” he asked eventually.

“I came to see you,” Johnny said, and Doyoung shot him a dirty look, well aware of how much that did not answer his question. “Start a goddamned fire, would you? It’s like being back in Antarctica in here.”

The building in which Doyoung lived had once been a stable, with a large area for horses below, walls of stone and brick that were easily a foot and a half thick, and a small area in which stablemen stayed above. The downstairs was now a general store, frequented by tourists, and the upstairs had been converted into a tiny loft, consisting mainly of kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and a surprisingly large closet. Doyoung liked it for its coziness, which others called cramped. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. There was a small, wood-burning stove in the bedroom, and mousetraps in the kitchen to deal with the vermin that lived happily in the shop below. He had many of his aunt’s possessions crammed into the space, including her framed hand-drawn maps hanging from the walls, her woolen blankets neatly stacked and shoved under the bed until the nights grew too cold, her china and silver dishes piled unused in the cupboards.

He also had her wooden chess set, with the pieces carved to look like Damyang wildlife, usually hidden away in the farthest corners of the closet. Johnny had, somehow or other, dragged it out and set it up on the table.

“Do you intend to play chess with someone?” Doyoung asked dubiously, gathering up the firewood.

“With you,” Johnny snapped irritably. “So get the fucking fire started, would you? Do I have to command you to do it?”

At a command, Doyoung’s body would do as Johnny said, regardless of what his mind wanted; it was one of the more charming parts of the ugly bargain he had made. At that threat, he went, quickly. He shoved crumpled newspaper, kindling, and a single log into the stove, and started it with a single match. Within a minute, it was burning nicely, and he returned, with considerable trepidation, to Johnny in the kitchen.

Besides the chess set, Johnny also had a bottle of whiskey, half emptied; that, Doyoung was sure, he had not found in the closet. He found himself wondering if Johnny knew what he had told Hyunjin, either back when he was sixteen, or on Sunday on the mountain. That was the thing about keeping a secret from someone, something, like Johnny; the only safe secrets were kept in the space in his head, and never uttered aloud. Even then, if it ever occurred to Johnny to order him to speak aloud anything he had been hiding…

“What is this about?” he asked nervously, sitting down across from Johnny.

“What makes you think it’s about anything?” Johnny asked. “The fact that my brother’s servant caught you by the side of the road a few days ago? Or did you and the other sparrow find something interesting on the mountain yesterday?” He smiled when Doyoung went stiff. “Or maybe, this town is the most boring fucking place I’ve spent more than a day in since the McMurdo Station.”

“We have books,” Doyoung said. “And the Internet. And the slopes are open for the season.”

Johnny smiled wryly and held out the bottle. “Have some of this.”

Doyoung shook his head and got up, out of his seat. “I’m going to make tea.”

“Oh, for fucking— you’re just as boring as this town.” Johnny took another good swig of whiskey, and was quiet for just a moment. “Tell me something— how did my brother fuck you?”

Doyoung’s hands were shaking when he held the kettle under the tap. “What do you mean ‘how’?”

“Were you on your hands and knees? On the floor, or did you get a bed for the occasion?”  
He filled the kettle with enough water to make an entire pot of tea. He pulled out the matches, started the gas, struck the match and lit the stove, put the kettle on the stove, and adjusted the gas, all before he said, “You’re a dick.”

“And you,” Johnny said, in clear amusement, “Have a lot to learn about insulting someone with creativity and vehemence.”

Doyoung sat down across from him, scowling. “There is something I wanted to talk to you about,” he heard himself saying, before he even knew he was going to say it.

There was the briefest of flickers on Johnny’s face, quickly suppressed. He said nothing at all, and Doyoung realized that he had to go on.

“I—” He hesitated. “I think— I—”

“It must be something serious, for you to start stammering that badly,” Johnny said wryly. “Allow me a guess: you think that I should release you from service.”

Doyoung let out a low breath. “You told me my service was in exchange for Jaehyun's life,” he said. “And Jaehyun is alive.”

Johnny smiled, briefly, as if Doyoung had told a joke. “You’ll find that those weren’t my precise words,” he said. “And precise words do matter in these sorts of situations.”

“And the crime,” Doyoung went on, his mouth going dry. “I— I’ve paid for it, by now, haven’t I? You’ve gotten two lives from me for one of his, already. Not counting this one.”

“Ah, yes,” Johnny said softly. “You’ve paid for your crime, and then some, and in all fairness, you should be free, shouldn’t you?” Doyoung said nothing. “But then… are you laboring under the impression, sweetheart, that I deal in fairness? Or justice? You and I made a deal.”

“I’m useless,” Doyoung said, so quietly that he might have said it only to himself, but Johnny abruptly went still. “There’s no point in keeping me around. I don’t do anything— I don’t have any powers or skills— and I just… I just infuriate you. You’ve gotten your revenge for Jaehyun's murder…”

“You’re powerless because I haven’t given you any power— and that’s a deliberate choice,” Johnny said, with his eyes glinting in a way that always left Doyoung wondering. “As for useless— you did a rather thorough job with the last task I gave you, didn’t you? I’d say you went above and beyond.” Doyoung stared at him. “And as for infuriating me…” he paused. “If you ask me for this again— ever again— I’m going to hurt you, and it’s not going to be a measly black eye. Do you understand me?”

“But—” Doyoung started.

“No. I’m not releasing you from service, and I don’t want to fucking hear this.” That evil, blazing insane look was starting to grow in Johnny’s eyes, just as the kettle started to whistle, and Doyoung, unhappy but fearful, dropped the subject completely.

By the time he sat down in his chair again, with a mug of Paris tea steaming hot, Johnny had gone back to his ordinary, sleepy-eyed look. “White moves first,” he told Doyoung, indicating the board.

“I don’t know how to play chess.”

“Then you’re probably going to lose,” Johnny said remorselessly.

Doyoung made a face and reached out, pushing the pawn (a chipmunk) in front of the queen (a piece carved into the shape of a cougar) two squares forward. Johnny immediately moved the knight, carved in in the shape of a salmon, out onto the board.

“Tell me something,” Johnny commented. “Why does everyone call you Doyoung and not Dongyoung?”

“I don’t even know why you ever called me Doyoung in the first place,” Doyoung answered, sliding another pawn (this one carved into the shape of a songbird) two spaces in front of the bishop. Johnny responded by moving a pawn of his own, this one one square in front of the king.

“Even your friends and family? Even your dead aunt? The bishop only moves diagonally,” he added, when Doyoung tried to move the bishop (a piece carved into the shape of a wolf) out straight forward.

“My aunt only called me Dongyoung. There’s no other family. Everyone else, though…” He moved another pawn instead, this one in front of the rook. Johnny moved his knight into the middle of the board. Doyoung moved the rook, a bulky piece carved into the shape of a moose, out into the board. “I guess that was your doing? When my aunt brought me here?”

“Those dreams? Sure. I needed you here, in Damyang, and it’s as easy as can be, inspiring a little madness in a human woman.” Johnny paused for only a moment before moving a pawn from in front of his queen to confronting a pawn of Doyoung’s. Doyoung moved the castle into a confrontation with Johnny’s knight, while Johnny moved his rook forward a single space, in front of the king.

Doyoung moved the rook forward, and took out Johnny’s knight, in the board’s first blood. He heard himself saying, without realizing just what was about to come out of his mouth, “You didn’t give her the cancer, did you? Or my mother… and that truck…”

Johnny glanced at him. He moved his bishop across the board, to eliminate one pawn of Doyoung’s. “No. What would have been the point?”

Doyoung went to move the rook again, but Johnny batted his fingers away. “Checkmate,” he said, indicating the angle of the bishop to Doyoung’s king, a heavy piece shaped like a bear.

“Oh.” Doyoung hesitated, and then moved the king diagonally forward, and out of harm’s way.

“You really aren’t any good at this,” Johnny said with a faint smile. “But you do know how to play, you little liar.” He offered Doyoung the whiskey again, but Doyoung shook his head. Even as he did so, Johnny moved a pawn diagonally forward and took out Doyoung’s castle.

“You’ve got your queen trapped,” he observed. “That’s no way to play.”

“How does the knight move?” Doyoung asked, picking his up. “In an L?” He moved his first knight onto the board. Johnny, in turn, moved his queen, a cougar, forward and eliminated one of Doyoung’s pawns.

“Checkmate,” he said, indicating the position, as if Doyoung was too stupid to see it. The queen was directly in front of Doyoung’s king.

Doyoung stared at the board for a long moment, but the pieces were a puzzle he couldn’t decipher.

“Do you win?” he asked uncertainly.

“Yes, I do,” Johnny said with a hidden smile, sweeping the board clean with a hand. “Good game, sweetheart. That was pathetic.”

Doyoung sat back in his chair. He wondered if Johnny would take it badly if he asked, pointedly, if it wasn’t time for him to leave.

Another question came to his mouth instead. “Why is it you want to be here when En wakes?”

Johnny took a good swig of whiskey; his bottle seemed to be refilling on its own when Doyoung looked away. “A dead god doesn’t wake every day,” he said, as if reprimanding. “Even at my age, it’s not something I’ve witnessed so many times.”

“That’s it?” Doyoung asked.

Johnny smiled. “And then there’s that other matter… my old enemy, as I’m sure you recall…” He fixed Doyoung with a look that Doyoung was sure was a reference to his new friendship with Hyunjin. “He might very well be weak and out of sorts when he rises from the ground.”

“You want to kill him,” Doyoung asserted.

“No,” Johnny said. “Well, yes, I wouldn’t be adverse to killing him— but it’s not so easy as that. Those old pagan gods of the dead… they don’t need worship or prayer or ambrosia to sustain them, and no violence can do them harm. But that doesn’t mean one can’t get the best of them.”

Doyoung opened his mouth, and then closed it. “Why…” he started. “Why are the two of you still enemies? I know the angels stand against the old pagan gods as a matter of course, but shouldn’t you have abandoned enmity like that when you fell?”

Johnny considered him. “Back when I was an angel,” he said. “I stole a certain relic from his temple.”

“And you still have it,” Doyoung guessed. Johnny inclined his head. “So you could, hypothetically, just give it back and all could be forgiven and forgotten, as it were.”

“That friendship of yours has had an effect on you,” Johnny observed.

“Maybe,” Doyoung agreed, nonplussed. Before he’d thought about it, and what a bad idea it was to say it, he said, “Why don’t you bury the hatchet with Youngho?”

That mad, dangerous look was in Johnny’s eyes before Doyoung could blink. “What?” Doyoung felt the blood go out of his face. “Nothing, nothing—”

“You’re just full of fucking ideas tonight, aren’t you, sweetheart?” Johnny snapped. “You want me to let you free, and you want me to— make up with — my brother. Those aren’t related, by any chance, are they? It couldn’t be that you’d rather have him for a master? Rather be his?”

“No,” Doyoung said quickly. “No, no, no, I don’t—”

But Johnny was moving, lunging closer across the table, even as Doyoung shrank back. “Are you sure, sweetheart?” he hissed. He grabbed Doyoung by the back of his neck, his fingers digging into his flesh. “You sure I didn’t put an idea into your mind when I sent you to seduce him? You sure you didn’t like it when he—”

“I don’t want him,” Doyoung babbled. “I don’t want him, and I don’t want you, I don’t want either of you, I want you both out of my life, I want you both dead and gone, and I never, ever want to see either of you, you or Youngho or Youngho or you ever ever again—”

There was a gleam in Johnny’s eyes, a mad, wild gleam, like a child who had sacrificed something, and deemed the price worth the value, if hardly bloody enough. “Well, sweetheart,” he said. “We don’t always get what we want.”

•••

Finally, two nights from his chess game with Johnny, it snowed.

It started while Doyoung was in the office, and reading R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps: Stay Out of the Basement when he should have been working. The lightest of flakes fell, almost invisible against the slate gray sky, before the sky turned dark and heavy and the snow came down swirling, faster and harder and heavier, moving walls of white guided by shrieking winds. Doyoung found himself distracted, time and again. He wasn’t sure how many times he came to staring out at windows of hypnotizing snow, to find himself holding pictures of Byungho’s autopsy, unsure if it had been a matter of seconds or minutes.

Minhyuk’s theory of a serial killer was not going terribly well. Of his four possible victims, there was some evidence that the first person was wildly depressed when he disappeared; the kind of person who went into the woods to become a suicide. The other one victim transpired, was an inexperienced hiker who was caught in the woods during a snowstorm and had become separated from his friends, a disastrous situation even for the experienced.

But Byungho had been murdered, of that there was no question. He had been a captive for perhaps a month; he showed signs of healed burns, wounds, and beatings, including cracked ribs and one broken ankle. He had been severely starved, and he had spent a good amount of time restrained. Other than that, it was difficult to tell much more; the body had been perfectly clean, despite its state of dismemberment and disarray, and (it was only a small note at the bottom of the page, presented by Woobin without additional comment) there was no indication of sexual assault.

Doyoung only scanned over the pages, unable to bring himself to study them in any more detail. Byungho's autopsy photos didn’t horrify him as much as autopsy photos usually did; he realized that he had already seen Byungho entirely opened up, and therefore, there was little more that the autopsy could do to reveal him.

Most of the officers were out in the snow, directing traffic, helping a tourist whose car had gone over the side of the road, and patrolling the streets, so it was a quiet day for Doyoung. He finished reading his Goosebumps book without anyone noticing what he was up to. He left at his usual time, just after dark, bid goodbye to the receptionist, and started the long trudge home.

The snow grew thicker and thicker as he walked, until he found himself pausing now and then and squinting for the next streetlight to make sure he was going in the right direction. He had visions in his head, of getting home and piling firewood into the stove, putting on the kettle and getting back to one of the books he liked to read best when it was snowing and storming outside

— the first of Garth Nix’s Seventh Towers books, The Fall, or V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic, or Diana Wynne Jones’s Hexwood— and this time, he never noticed when the streetlights overhead went out. He never heard the footsteps behind him. He never knew anything at all, until arms closed around his from behind and dragged him off his feet.

He struggled like a mad thing; Lucas was in his head, or maybe Jaehyun, dragging him off to see one or the other of the twins, and he wanted none of it. He kicked wildly, backwards and forward, thrashed, and screamed, his voice a shrill nothing against the storm. But the man who had him was big, implacable, and he was carried efficiently and quickly to a nearby shape. He barely had a moment to realize that the snow-covered lump was a car before the trunk was opened and he was shoved down inside.

He was already struggling, limbs flailing outwards, but the man— nothing more than an enormous silhouette in the snow— grabbed both wrists in one hand and took something out of his pocket with the other. For a wild, terrible moment, Doyoung thought it was a gun— and then the man touched it to his side, and it jolted him.

Electricity shocked through him, and he went stock still, his spine twisting back horribly.

Darkness blotted in front of his eyes, and then he was gone.

***

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning: torture, gore, death of a rabbit

When she knelt over him, it did not occur to him to be afraid. She smelled of fresh herbs and heady perfumes and dried posies, and bells tinkled with the rustling cloth of her voluminous dress and shawl. Her hair was a curly, wispy halo around her head, and her face was still young, despite her millennia. They said, on the streets, that she kept her youthful looks by the bathing in virgins’ blood, but they said that about most any witchy woman. The Buda night was as hot as an oven and the air was as thick and heavy as the waters of the Danube. She touched a branch to Doyoung’s forehead, and he was not afraid. Something shivered in the very heart of things, and Doyoung felt as though he had twitched a little too forcefully, and by doing so, he had divested himself of nearly all of his weight. He could fly, he was so light, he thought dizzily, happily, and Yura caught him sandwiched in her palms. Her hands were gentle if inescapable, the left missing its smallest finger. He remembered her laughter.

Doyoung had, in his dubious career, been placed in birdcages, many times figuratively and once literally. His memory of his time as a sparrow was vague and ultimately dreamlike. It had lasted for a time that seemed like both an eternity and a handful of days. He remembered a residual human sullenness, but mostly, at the time, his thoughts were a sparrow’s thoughts, a sparrow’s joy at the morning sun and the sharp and bitter and sweet taste of seeds, a bird’s nervousness at the yellow-eyed cat that watched him lovingly every single day and often batted scarred paws through the bars of the cage. He had waited, patient as only a sparrow could be, for Johnny to come and fetch him. Johnny had taken his time about it; three years.

Of all the times that he had been locked in cellars, attics, jail cells, closets, and cages, that had been his favorite.

This, and now, was something else entirely.

On the third day, the man finally came for him.

•••

In the dim timelessness of the basement, there was no way to know how many days it had been. He told time by his body, his periodic sleepiness, his desperate and increasingly vicious hunger, and the sickness that overtook him as the lack of food began to take hold. The basement in which he was held was little more than a cement block, of ceiling, four walls, and floor, all of them perfectly alike. There was a toilet (recently installed, if he had to guess) and a sink. There was a drain in the middle of the floor, and a spigot for a hose, but no hose. He drank water from the sink (it was his only activity) and he slept on the floor. It was bitterly cold, and the light was so dim that his eyes never truly adjusted to it when he was awake, but it kept him half awake all the same.

He woke on the second day (he thought) with his heart in palpitations, sick to his stomach. He dragged himself up to the sink and drank water, but nearly fainted in the process. The sickness lasted for hours.

On the third day, the lights went out.

Doyoung was left in pitch darkness for at least an hour, and probably closer to six. He tried to sleep, curled up in the corner, but he woke with his eyes open, heart pounding, waiting for whatever was coming.

He heard the heavy footsteps before the door opened, the sound of walking down a flight of stairs.

When the door opened, Doyoung was blinded, too much to make out even a silhouette.

He put his arms up, to wield off the man before him, and when the man grabbed him, he squeezed his burning eyes shut and tried to fight him off, tried to thrash and hit and kick. He was weak, exhausted, and dehydrated, and the man forced him down easily enough, onto his belly, where he knelt, one knee crushing Doyoung’s right knee into the ground, the other on the small of his back. A hand grabbed his throat and forced his head up, until his chest was off the ground, his spine arched uncomfortably. He had barely a moment to panic over this forced, intimate position before the man forced a bottle into his hands. Liquid sloshed onto his skin, and Doyoung shivered. His eyes were still a blurry mess, but it seemed to him that the liquid was black—

“Drink.” The voice was horribly familiar but unplaceable; deep and hoarse, and entirely without sympathy. A hand forced the mouth of the bottle to Doyoung’s lips and, reflexively, he tasted it. And spat. It was poison, he was sure, or worse. It smelled like dirt and rot, tasted like saccharine spice, and he thought he’d be sick. He tried to struggle away, tried to push it away and spill it, but the man held it steady with one hand.

The other hand stabbed something, something sharp and thin and metal, into the meat of the back of Doyoung’s left thigh, stabbed down until it hit the femur. It was not sharp— it punched through Doyoung’s skin through the man’s sheer force of strength.

Doyoung screamed, and choked when the man sloshed the liquid into his mouth. “Drink!”

He managed another mouthful of it, but when he spat it out, the man let out a sigh, barely perceptible. And then, he turned the drill on.

The noise was unmistakeable, as was the shocking agony in Doyoung’s thigh, the feel of something, some metal bit, drilling into his bone. He screamed.

A moment later, the drill was turned off, and this time, he drank as much as he could.

Once down his throat, he thought it was some concoction of branches or weeds, some sort of strange and terrible tea; it was, at least, the consistency of water, and he was sure it was poison. It was so horrible he could only choke down half, before the man turned the drill on again; and then, he managed to finish it.

He was left alone after that. The lights were returned, to their dim ambiguity, and Doyoung, without very much success, attempted to shape out the wound on his thigh as best he could. There was blood everywhere; soaking his jeans, puddling on the floor, running in precise spirals down the lines of cement to the drain. He could feel the injury in the bone, could feel the torn flesh, but he could only be concerned about it for a matter of minutes before the brew took hold of him.

He vomited it into the toilet, again and again, but it worked its way through him.

***

Doyoung dreamed that he stood before Youngho, and cried out: for mercy, for salvation, for justice, for whatever it was one asked of angels. He was hurt, bleeding, from a vicious hole in his thigh, and there was blood smeared on his hands when he begged. Youngho stood over him, implacable, monolithic, of a shadowed face, and Doyoung realized he was on his knees. He had no sooner thought it than he knew that really, he wasn’t human at all— he was still a sparrow by Yura's doing, and how had he not known it, mangled bird leg and feathers and all? And then, even more surprising— he realized that Youngho was not an angel after all, but a snake, pitch black, and rearing—

He woke: feverish, his heart going faster than he’d ever known it could go, covered in filth of his own doing, his skin dry and tight, his eyes and head and bones hurting. The wound in his thigh was agony, and it took him the better part of a half hour to string together enough thoughts to realize that what he needed was water. It took him another half hour to drag himself across half the length of the room, and then, with great difficulty, up to the sink. He had some notions of washing the filth off himself, and washing the wound, but in practice, he barely managed to drag himself up to swallow a mouthful or two before he fainted.

He woke as the sink overflowed, and spilled over the sides and all over the cement floor, washing just what blood it overlapped down into the drain. Doyoung watched it, comforted, mesmerized, and eventually managed to roll himself over to lick at the water.

Time passed. Perhaps a day; there was no way to tell.

He came to, startled horribly out of his dreaming, when the quiet roar of the sink went silent. He opened his eyes to find the man standing over him, and immediately scrambled up to sitting and back against the wall, his heart pounding painfully in his chest. Besides the shock, there was something deeply, uncomfortably unnerving about his alertness slacking so much, and his mind receding so deeply into unconsciousness, that he didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs or the door opening.

The man had a hose in hand. He set it down in order to grab Doyoung’s ankle and pull him, forcibly, closer, and all the scrabbling at the floor and kicking did nothing to prevent it. With powerful, and brutally efficient hands, he stripped Doyoung’s filthy clothes, casting them aside, and then picked up the hose. The water was freezing and bruising when it hit his skin, and Doyoung yelped in protest, but the man ignored him.

When the water blasted into the wound in his thigh, a brilliant display of color passed in front of his eyes. He came to moments later to find himself flat on his back, the man crouched over him. There was something in his hands.

Doyoung stared up at him, unable to make out a face in the dim light, or even if the man was wearing some sort of mask.

“You’re awake?” the man asked frankly, and his voice sounded so achingly familiar. Doyoung blinked. So familiar, but he couldn’t place it. His gaze, though it was hard to tell, seemed to be roaming down Doyoung’s body.

Doyoung tried to struggle up, and out of the man’s easy reach, but the man laid the device— something small and black— to his ankle, and power shocked through him. His back arched involuntarily, and he tried to scream, but he couldn’t breathe, as convulsions swept through him, one fiery wave after the next.

He blinked back unconsciousness, but he couldn’t move now, could barely even breathe.

“Do you know how long it’s been, Doyoung?” The man asked evenly, and Doyoung tried to shake his head, or whisper, with no reaction from his muscles. “Almost five days now. It’s known that you’re missing, of course; there’s been a police report, and some discussion. Questions as to whether or not you’ve left town for good— and if you’ve left of your own volition.” He paused.

The taser— the device— was held just over Doyoung’s hip, and Doyoung was horrendously certain that the man was going to use it again. He watched— it was all he could do— and he wondered if his muscles would seize up until he stopped breathing, wondered if the burning electricity would cook his brain or arrest his heart.

“Don’t you wonder why Seo Johnny hasn’t come for you?” The man tapped the plastic part of the taser against Doyoung’s hip, as if idly tapping a pencil on a desk. “Or maybe you’ve held out hope that any moment how, at any time, he’s going to walk through those doors instead of me. And you’ll be saved. But allow me to let you in on a secret, Doyoung— he can’t find you. Not here. Not even him.”

With that, he let the taser bite, at the place where Doyoung’s hipbone jutted out the most, and fire washed through him, in screaming waves, again and again. He thought he wet himself, but it was hard to know, or care.

He came to, shaking, just in time for the man to lay the taser to him again, against his collar bone.

***

When he woke, he thought it had been hours. He was lying on his side; it seemed that the man had hosed him down again. There were three distinct burns, with black holes like snake bites on his skin, and the wound on the back of his thigh was agony.

He managed to drag himself over to a corner of the room, and curled up, his arms wrapped around his knees, and wished he had his clothes back. His mind, before long, was preoccupied trying to think of who the man might be; someone who knew Johnny, and knew to call him Doyoung; someone whose voice he knew.

He hadn’t seen the face, but the man was big, probably more than six feet tall, and broad-shouldered. That, he thought ironically, described a great many people in his life, including most of the police officers. Still— considering the mention of Johnny— it must have been someone he had known in a past life. And there were so many people he had once known, many people Johnny had made an enemy of in some way or another…

He drifted off thinking of that promise, that Johnny couldn’t find him, and how strange it was, given that he hadn’t thought to expect a rescue from Johnny of all people. He had wished, certainly, when half conscious, but no more than that…

He woke in shock to find that the man had returned.

“You— You’re with Youngho,” he accused, blurting it out with a slurring voice.

The man’s back was to him, as he struggled with something in the middle of the room. “Hardly,” he answered, without turning.

Doyoung closed his eyes, but struggled to come to a moment later. Something was happening, and, despite his one-time predilection for suicide, he did not want to die.

He realized, with a sinking sort of horror, that it was a kiddie pool, and the man was filling it with the water from the hose.

“No,” he said, very quietly, but he was ignored.

The man turned off the water, and then stood, towering over Doyoung. “Are you ready to die, Doyoung?” he asked. Doyoung had no better idea of who he was now than he had ever before.

He wanted to struggle away, to run, but all the energy was gone from his body, and he could hardly move. The man seized him by the upper arms and dragged him, up, onto feet that would not support his weight, and then, almost gently, over to the pool. He pushed him into water that was so cold it took his breath away.

He lay Doyoung down, submerged, with his feet dangling over the edge, and only his face above water. Doyoung breathed shallowly, and lay perfectly still in the shocking cold, as if he could pretend that he did not exist, and therefore escape being drowned. After perhaps a minute of stillness, he opened his eyes and stared up, at the man. He could still see nothing more than a silhouette. The man’s hands were warm, though quickly cooling in the water, and they held Doyoung exactly where the man wanted him; submerged, but not drowning.

It was some time before he realized that this wasn’t death by drowning; this was death by hypothermia.

After that, it was somewhat alarming how quickly it happened. Doyoung’s body had no energy left, no fuel with which to defend itself, and he went from shivering, uselessly and violently, to a greater, and far more powerful stillness in only a matter of minutes. Hallucinations swam in front of his eyes, strange and peculiar, and when he closed them, he saw crows, dancing in his sight and pecking at him with cruel, inquisitive beaks.

And then, quite out of no where, the man pushed him under the water.

Doyoung struggled, briefly, but he could hardly make his limbs move. The air went out of his lungs in a rush of bubbles, and he closed his eyes.

***

He came to with the man pumping on his chest. He tried to take a breath, and found himself choking and sputtering, coughing up water, and then vomiting up water, and coughing up a great deal more. The man turned him, onto his side, and then onto his stomach, while Doyoung coughed and coughed, hardly able to believe he could even have this much water in his lungs.

“As good as new,” the man said, and he sounded quite proud of himself. He hauled Doyoung up, barely noticing his struggles, and dunked him in the kiddie pool to clean off the spat up water and vomit. Doyoung shook and tried to fight him off, his mind shying away from the very idea of water, let alone the reality of it.

The man paused long enough to upend the pool, sending an enormous amount of water down the drain, while Doyoung shivered, and then he left, again. Doyoung dragged himself over to the driest corner of the room, and curled up on himself. The shivering, some aftereffect of his heart restarting, stopped quickly enough, and he was left, cold and wet and starved.

He had died twice before. It was a murder the first time, and a suicide the second. There was a memory of death, deep in his bones if not in his mind, a recollection of the overwhelming weakness and the cold that penetrated the heart of him. He felt death coming, felt a specter over his shoulder. He felt the strength go out of the cells that made up his body, and his organs shut down one by one. He was sure that it was here, in the cold and the weakness of five days’ torture, starvation, and poison.

He closed his eyes, but this time, he heard it when the man returned. It hadn’t been much more than a few minutes, let alone an hour; Doyoung glanced at the shrinking pool of water, to make sure that he was right.

There was something in his hands that glinted in the sparse light; Doyoung didn’t recognize it until the cuffs were around his ankles, and then another pair around his wrists. The man picked Doyoung up and hauled him over one shoulder, carrying him out of that evil room, and up the stairs. Doyoung squirmed, torn between relief so enormous it could have inundated him, and a deep sense of fear, at whatever this change might mean.

He was brought into the living room of a small cabin, where a futon had been unfolded in front of a fireplace. The fire had burnt down to warm embers, and the windows that showed the outside world were dark, with snow caked up on the glass. As the fire was the only source of poor light, Doyoung could only barely make out his surroundings, but he squinted, trying to see as much as possible. The room was small, and clean, of sparse furniture such as an armchair and the occasional lamp or table, but with furs draped here and there; the furs of black bears, grizzly bears, and gray wolves, Doyoung thought, as the man laid him down on futon. He caught the briefest glimpse of the man’s face, still dark in the angle of the light, but showing the distinct and achingly familiar hint of a square jaw and straight nose and brow. The man wrapped Doyoung in an electric blanket, and then bundled him in the furs, before moving away, to plug the electric blanket into the wall.

Doyoung stayed still and quiet, counting on nothing but the electric blanket to save him. He closed his eyes and turned his head to the side. The wound in his thigh was a dull ache, numbed by the cold, and his heart was beating the strangest of patterns in his chest. His stomach was an empty maw, but for just now, he could avoid it, enjoying the building warmth of the electric blanket.

He wasn’t quite awake when the man returned, and pulled his arms out of the blanket. He was vaguely aware of one arm being painted with something, of the man doing something with some equipment, but he didn’t open his eyes.

“If I were to do the thing properly, I would be using body heat to warm you instead of an electric blanket,” that annoyingly familiar voice commented lightly, as if he didn’t truly want to wake Doyoung. “But I don’t think I can stand to touch you that much.”

Something bit Doyoung’s arm, and he opened his eyes. It was an I.V.; the man had taped the needle down, and hooked the tube up to a bag of clear fluid, which in turn hung from a wheeled stand. It occurred to Doyoung, vaguely, in the back of his mind, that the man had gotten his hands on hospital equipment, which could not be that easy; he realized that the man must have been a doctor, or a surgeon, or a nurse, in order to be able to pierce his arm with such precision, even in the bad light.

And then, quite suddenly, he knew who the man was.

He tried to sit up, and was immediately pinned down by a hand on his neck. “Don’t be stupid, Doyoung,” the doctor said flatly.

“Doctor—Dr. Hyungsik.” His heart was a painful staccato in his chest. “Wh— What? Why? What are you…”

Dr. Hyungsik’s face was expressionless. “I thought we weren’t going to have to go through all those questions,” he said sternly. “You and I.”

“Why are you doing this?” Doyoung whimpered.

“That should be obvious, Doyoung.” He paused, and because it wasn’t obvious, not to Doyoung, he said, “You’re to be a sacrifice for the god.”

***

Choi Hyungsik, born Seoul, as well as a hundred other unimportant sobriquets in the years between, was a professional madman. He was a priest, in the old way of priesthood, an oracle, a prophet, and a seer; a lunatic, a murderer, a blind fanatic, and a ruthless plotter. Such was his profession.

He was old, now, and he had been about the business of being a madman for quite some time. A good deal of the élan had gone out of his worship, which was all well and fine. His god was old, and hardly in the habit of wrecking ecstatic devastation or plagues and ruin. Hyungsik hardly missed it. But there were still certain practical affairs to see to.

He took Doyoung, tortured him, murdered him, and revived him, all as he had done to a hundred or a thousand others throughout the years, and most of them with quite a bit more fanfare. The god had almost no followers left, and no interest in the worship of himself, and so any sacrifice would do for his awakening. If Hyungsik had been so inclined, the god could very well go without a sacrifice, and no one would ever notice, least of all the god himself. Not when he had the girl (and how Hyungsik remembered her) to entertain him.

Since Hyungsik had absolute freedom in the matter, he had made his choice with deliberate, vicious precision, and the intention to revenge an old wrong. He was not, after all, in the sort of business where one forgot or forgave wrongs.

Now, he had the boy in his hands, wrecked, helpless, and trapped. He sat on the edge of the futon, and gazed down at Doyoung’s sleeping face. The boy was as white as a corpse, with dark bruises under his eyes, and even in sleep, he looked miserable. His hair was tangled. Doyoung was a pretty thing, slender and small, with a thin face and good features, including large, long-lashed eyes and pouty lips. He was the sort of catamite who had, in the ancient days, sold for a decent fortune; and exactly that had happened to him, at least once, Hyungsik knew.

He put a hand on Doyoung’s arm, the exposed skin, and he let a vision take him.

It was a blurry, violent affair. Doyoung was too unconscious to lead immediately to something clear, unless Hyungsik forced him, but for the moment, he was most interested in what naturally floated to the surface. He saw only flashes of moments: a boy shivering with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders; the bloody murder of a drunk; Yura's smile, and Hyunjin's face, with her very modern blue hair. There was the rape, brutal, and it was immediately followed by the memory of standing on the edge of the roof, quivering, just about to jump.

Doyoung woke with a start, shifting in the blankets and furs with an erratic movement. He stared up at Hyungsik. “P-please give me something to eat,” he begged. “Please, please…”

“After all the effort I went through to render you pure?” Hyungsik asked, in some annoyance. He unhooked the I.V., and pulled away the blanket, before unlocking the handcuffs around his ankles. “Come on,” he said, hauling Doyoung up by his arm.

Doyoung yelped as soon as his left leg hit the floor, and the leg gave out immediately. Hyungsik sighed, and picked him up, carrying him to the bathroom. He waited, patiently outside the door, while Doyoung went about his business, and while he waited, he considered that wound. It was more likely to be infected than not. He had done it, in all honesty, because he had wanted to; he had enjoyed doing it, and it had made it remarkably easy to make Doyoung drink the cleansing brew.

“I’m not pure at all,” Doyoung said, when he opened the bathroom door. He was standing on one leg, the other curled slightly underneath him like an injured dog. “Not with what I’ve done. I wouldn’t make a good sacrifice.”

“You’ll be an excellent sacrifice,” Hyungsik said, smiling, and using the tones one would to reassure a child. He reached out to pet Doyoung’s hair, and Doyoung flinched away. “The best sacrifice since Hyunjin herself.”

Doyoung winced at that. Hyungsik carried him back to the electric blanket; he was already shivering, which was a good sign for the hypothermia, but he still looked haggard and exhausted, and very distinctly like he was dying.

“You can’t dedicate me to a god,” he said, kicking weakly when Hyungsik grabbed his ankles to cuff them again. His eyes were already closed. “I already… a devil…”

Hyungsik paused, and then, snapped his fingers in front of Doyoung’s face. Doyoung jumped, and blinked himself awake. “Listen to me,” he said, smiling. He reached down into the blankets, stroking the boy’s flesh; reached down and down, to the boy’s thigh, and then around. Doyoung went very still. “A very long time ago,” he whispered. “Your Johnny took something that was… precious… to me. It’s been some time, but I don’t forget. Now, finally… I intend to return the favor.”

Doyoung’s face was a mask. This close, his strange eyes looked very nearly inhuman, the color so pale that they might have been yellow, and ringed in a darker brown. “Who are you?” he asked, unnerved.

Hyungsik smiled. “You would have heard the name Bjarnmothr,” he said, and Doyoung blanched.

“I’m not precious to Johnny,” Doyoung whispered. His voice rose, shrill and panicked. “I’m not worth anything to him at all, please, just let me go, and—“

Hyungsik dug his fingers into the wound, and Doyoung screamed. He went white and still, and broke out in a sweat, shaking.

“Quiet,” Hyungsik ordered.

***

At dawn, with a storm brewing in the west, Hyungsik dragged Doyoung, naked and white with death, outside, and flung him down in the snow.

He retrieved a small kennel, and dragged out the contents by its long ears, holding the rabbit up where Doyoung could see it. “You want to eat, don’t you?” he taunted, and Doyoung sent him a baleful look, with whatever little energy he possessed. “You’re lucky,” Hyungsik continued, walking closer. He nudged Doyoung with his boot. “Kneel,” he ordered, and Doyoung did it. He was barely shivering anymore, which was not a good sign, but hardly unexpected at this point. “We sacrifice whichever we would prefer to see the god increase— civilization or the wild. In the old days, that was always civilization, and the sacrifice always found him or herself slitting the throat of a human child.”

Doyoung turned his face away as Hyungsik crouched down next to him. “Even Hyunjin?”

“No,” Hyungsik said. “Not Hyunjin. She was… a different kind of sacrifice.” He placed the rabbit, bucking and clawing though it was, firmly in Doyoung’s hands. “If you let that escape, and I have to hunt down another one, I’m going to cut your feet off,” he threatened, and Doyoung’s hands tightened around the rabbit’s neck as much as they could; nonetheless, it was still obviously close to inadvertent freedom.

Hyungsik placed a knife in Doyoung’s right hand. “Kill it,” he ordered.

There was a flash of consideration when Doyoung glanced up at him— the question, perhaps, if he could stab Hyungsik and flee. But Hyungsik had the taser in one hand, and was watching him, patiently, for any sign of mischief. Doyoung must have known it would be fruitless— and, perhaps, the hunger won out. He put the knife at the rabbit’s throat, under the ear.

“Not like that,” Hyungsik said quickly. “Slit it open from throat to tail, the long way— there. And don’t let it escape,” he added again, sharply, when the rabbit gave a very good thrashing and Doyoung nearly released it.

Difficultly, carefully, Doyoung sliced it downwards, while it kicked and struggled like a mad thing. It took him several tries, his hands never quite obeying his orders. Finally, blood spurted all over Doyoung’s hands, his thighs, and his belly. He had the good sense to cut deep, perhaps to see that the animal suffered as little as possible. When he had only just finished, the rabbit gave another, if somewhat more feeble struggle, and twisted in Doyoung’s hands. The guts came free, in a mess, and Doyoung’s face showed his disgust. He was well and truly splattered with rabbit blood and shit by then.

“Find the heart,” Hyungsik ordered, enjoying this, “And cut it out.” Doyoung shot him a quick look, as if to surmise whether he was being serious. “It’ll be easier to find while it’s still beating,” Hyungsik added.

When he had the heart, red and small and trailing arteries and veins clutched in one hand, Hyungsik crouched down to take the rabbit away. “Eat,” he ordered.

Doyoung had only barely swallowed it when he doubled over and then turned away to vomit blood into the snow. Hyungsik, suddenly furious, kicked him hard in the stomach. Doyoung shrieked, curling up and rolling away. Hyungsik delivered the next kick to his thigh, just below the wound, and this time, when Doyoung screamed, a thin, yellowish beer-like substance erupted from the half-closed wound.

The sight of it calmed Hyungsik, if only momentarily. With snow swirling all around him, he grabbed Doyoung and half carried, half dragged him back into the cabin, blood and mess leaking down the boy’s leg as they went. “I’m not— I’m not what you want,” Doyoung babbled as they went. “It won’t do you any good, it won’t…”

In the bathroom, Hyungsik cleaned the wound as carefully as he might, and then sewed it up, ignoring Doyoung’s screaming. That done, he wrapped it in bandages before cleaning away the smeared rabbit blood and allowing Doyoung to rinse out his mouth and brush his teeth. He wrapped the bandages in plastic, and let the boy shower, if only briefly, enough to wash his hair and regain some warmth. Doyoung had to sit on the floor of the bathtub and rest his head against the wall, but he did what Hyungsik commanded.

“Please give me something to eat,” he begged, even as Hyungsik wrapped up once again in the electric blanket and furs. “Please, please, something, anything… please…”

Hyungsik, much as it irritated him to capitulate, did; he gave the boy a handful of saltine crackers, and then a glass of water. While Doyoung ate, ignoring him, he traced a hand around the boy’s hairline and found swollen lymph nodes behind his ears, and in his throat. He prepared another I.V., this one of antibiotics.

Outside, the storm was growing fierce, a howling mass of blown in snow and ice. Hyungsik dragged the rabbit corpse inside, beheaded and skinned it, and placed it in the freezer in a plastic bag. He brought in several loads of firewood, all while Doyoung slept. He was just considering making a meal for himself when the power went out.

He swore, and lit a handful of candles, here and there, and threw another two logs on the fire. He lit the gas stove with a match and heated a venison soup for himself. He had just finished eating it when it occurred to him that a power outage meant the loss of the electric blanket.

Sure enough, he went into the living room to find the boy unnaturally still on the futon, despite the happily crackling fire nearby. With some mild irritation, Hyungsik retrieved a down comforter from the closet, and discarded the electric blanket. He stripped his own clothes off and lay down on the futon next to the boy, wrapping the comforter and the furs around both of them.

Doyoung woke, slowly, and went perfectly still when he realized how close Hyungsik was. “I know you’re going to kill me,” he said, quietly. “You’re not going to be the first, or even the second. But I still think that you should know that you’re not going to be getting back at Johnny when you do it. Johnny couldn’t give less of a shit about me.”

Hyungsik grinned. “I’m a seer, and an oracle, boy,” he said quietly. “I’m not often wrong about this sort of thing.”

Doyoung went quiet at that, and Hyungsik craned around to reach him.

“I could show you,” he said.

Doyoung cringed back. “What?”

He had many gifts from Enemessar, in his day. Without another word, he reached out to Doyoung, and grabbed his neck. With that, he gave Doyoung the gift of Sight.

Doyoung flung himself backwards as if seizing, limbs flailing, twitching. The I.V. came free of his arm, splattering blood and fluid about until Hyungsik grabbed it and pinched it off.

“You’re not quite so useless anymore, Doyoung,” he promised. He threw an arm around the boy, and dragged him close. “Now,” he ordered. “Sleep.”

***

Doyoung dreamed.

He stood in a cathedral, a glorious place, of pillars and great walls and arched ceilings overhead. But when he looked closer, he realized that the walls and pews and the bricks under his feet, the arched ceilings and the stained glass windows, it was all made of viscera; blood and flesh, muscle and organ tissue and soft membranes and twisting, glistening fat.

He walked up to the altar, and he found, there, a dark-haired boy, and a dark-haired girl, talking to each other. He was of the impression that they were talking about him, because when he drew nearer, they stopped, and stared at him.

He knew they were from the ancient world. By their garments, the rough linen and cotton clothes and well-worn sandals, the shells and glass beads for jewelry. More than that, he knew it by their smell. The smells of clean sweat and posies and perfume, the rough, sheep fat soap that was once so popular. It reminded him, vaguely, of Buda. Not everyone in Buda had smelled good, not by a long stretch, but as Doyoung had once been a catamite, it had been in his best interests to be sweet smelling. To guess by their clothes, their smell, and their youthful, pretty faces, these two were of a similar social rank.

“Here he is,” the boy announced, and he did not sound impressed.

“You’ve taken over,” the girl accused Doyoung.

“I didn’t mean to,” Doyoung said, looking back and forth between them.

“You didn’t mean to— oh, well,” the girl mocked, sneering. “Perhaps not, but you made the bargain all the same.”

“Well,” the boy echoed. “We’ll all be free soon enough. When he cuts you open.”

**

Hyungsik dreamed of Emin, as he had not dreamed of the beloved in years; perhaps decades.

Hyungsik had been born monstrous. The visions had first struck him at the age of five, and he had thought they would split his skull open with their power— he had lain on the floor of his family’s hut, with the snow piling around them, and screamed as gods and demons and monsters and beasts chased their way through his head in sights of blood and fire and horror. The madness came when he was six, and he no longer knew his parents. His first murder was when he was seven, and he struck his elder brother with a stone, until the skull cracked and there were brains on his hands.

He had been assigned to the worship of a sun god, for some time, considering his visions and his foresight. That had not lasted long, not after he had seduced and murdered a lord’s son. He fled south, and eventually he found Enemessar, though the god went by a different name then.

He was an evil man, and well aware of it. He raped when it suited him, did murder both in cold blood and in the insane rages that came over him with a vision, incited war in his god’s name, spread plague when the god commanded it, and found joy in most all of it.

Until Emin. The boy was nothing more than a temple orphan, grown into a pretty catamite, and given to Bjarnmothr as a personal slave as a matter of practicality. Bjarnmothr had fallen in love— so deeply in love that he hurt, as he never had before and never would again. He kept Emin protected, safe from the mercurial politics of the temple and safe from his own insane rages. Five years went by.

And then the angel, Johnny, one half of the twins, came to the temple, with the intention of taking a relic for his own. It was late at night, and Emin was the only attendant seeing to it that the lanterns had enough oil to keep the wicks lit. Emin tried to stop him, and Johnny struck him down.

The twin angels, Johnny and Youngho, and the god Enemessar had a longstanding enmity long before and long after that single incident, and Bjarnmothr, as the god’s foremost follower (besides, perhaps, the witch Yura shared that hatred. It continued long after Johnny Fell.

In the dream he held Emin, squirming in his arms, and the boy curled close to him, his skin warm with sunlight, his back arching, body craning up to kiss Hyungsik. Hyungsik glanced down at him to see, for a fraction of a moment, those dark eyes and that soft dark hair before the boy’s skin erupted into poppies and he dissolved into nothing.

***

Hyungsik shook Doyoung awake. The boy seemed disoriented and half-mad, but Hyungsik wasn’t especially concerned.

“Did you dream?” he demanded, and Doyoung nodded, quailing. “Did you see your fallen angel in the dream? Seo Johnny?”

“No,” Doyoung whispered.

Hyungsik set his mouth, tightened his grip on Doyoung’s arm and dragged him, forcibly, into a vision.

There was a dizzying array of options before him, but he settled on that moment, in the early winter of 1766 in the city of Buda, which was to become Budapest in slightly less than a hundred years. Hyungsik remembered Buda, himself— he had been there, for a time, when Johnny and Enemessar were in the midst of another minor feud. But he had never laid eyes on the newest, youngest, and most pathetic of Johnny's minions; he had only heard an errant comment from his colleague, Yura, about keeping the boy in a birdcage for three odd years.

The scene before him was that of an old, abandoned building, on the outskirts of the city; it had been used, perhaps, for grain storage at one time, and abandoned to the rats, who had left their skeletons and shit piled in the corners. A storm brewed outside, unnatural and violent, with torrents of rain, deafening thunder, and lightning that streaked across the sky in blinding displays of light. The old warehouse was lit from within by the witchlights that Johnny's minions held in their hands.

They formed a semi-circle around the wretched boy; Meihui in a noblewoman’s garb; Phaedyme, who had the marks of tears interrupting her kohl make-up, and who alone looked the most furious of them; Wmffre, who held an old spellbook in hand, and stared at the boy with a deep curiosity; and even Ihuicatl, the prodigal son who had since vanished, and who alone managed to keep his face even and expressionless. All were present except, of course, for Calisgilgati.

The boy himself was small, and scrawny, perhaps eighteen, but an undernourished eighteen. He wore clothes that were little better than rags, and he had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. There were dirty, worn-out sandals on his feet, and the faint scars across his face where he had been punched or back-handed by a man wearing rings. There were, even then, splotches of drying blood on his hands, wrists, and down his front; he had been caught still cleaning away the evidence of his crime. Those peculiar, pale brown eyes were wide, and he seemed to be trying to glare like a furious thing at the devil’s minions before him.

Hyungsik glanced back at the other boy, the one whom he dragged forcibly into this vision from the present, and whom he held by the arm. This Doyoung glanced around at the scene with a wary expression before meeting Hyungsik’s gaze. “You can just do that?” he whispered. “Just… march into the past?”

Hyungsik grinned. “Did you think that I knelt in front of an altar, inhaling sacred smoke until I was high out of my mind, and then waited until some vision seized me like a mother shaking a baby?” He neglected to point out that Doyoung now had the same capabilities, if a far lesser power. “Tell me — how is it that a scrawny thing like you managed to kill Calisgilgati?”

Doyoung shuddered, and the memory of a bloody body, slumped underneath a bar slipped into Hyungsik’s mind, from the skin -to-skin contact between them. “I snuck up on him, when he was happily drunk. I was waiting for him to pass out, but— it didn’t go according to plan. I’d thought to slit his throat, too, but I stabbed him instead… again and again…”

“Why?” Hyungsik asked. He had more than a fleeting glimpse into the boy’s mind, what with his grip on his arm, but all he saw was shame, brutal regret, and lingering horror, and none of that answered his question.

Doyoung grimaced. “I was in love.”

He was saved from Hyungsik’s response. “You,” the deep voice echoed into the otherwise empty building. “You, boy, murdered my child.”

Johnny, finally arrived. His eyes were dark and glinting mad, and his voice, for all its echoing, was not loud.

The boy’s shoulders were hunched against the unfamiliar cold of the storm, and for all that his gaze was bright and vicious, his knuckles were very white where he clutched the blanket to himself. “Yes— yes, I did.” His voice wavered. He had the good sense to keep his comments short.

“What accent is that?” Hyungsik murmured.

“Polish,” Doyoung said quietly. Images filtered through his mind, half-remembered; a wretched caravan, caretakers who may or may not have been his parents; the arrival at the great city of Buda, and being sold, blistered feet and all, to a lustful master.

The boy, however, was speaking, and squaring his shoulders as best he could even as he stammered. “He- he- murdered my- my master,” he declared, and for all his stammering and all his attempts at emotionlessness, he couldn’t quite keep the fury and hatred out of his voice. There was the image of another man in Hyungsik’s mind, with his head smashed in, lying in the alley outside a tavern.

“I could not give less of a shit about your master,” Johnny said bluntly, and the boy shrugged, as if to say, what does it matter what you care? Hyungsik caught the errant thought, even though he was not touching that boy of the past, that Johnny, with his red hair and general unkempt appearance, did not look like a lord; he did not know if the man was a demi-god or a demon or a sorcerer-priest.

“You don’t deny it,” Johnny observed.

“I-I-I did it,” the boy said, and held out his hands to show the blood, and that there could never be any denying it.

Phaedyme shifted, suddenly, and silently.

“And you don’t beg for mercy,” Johnny said.

“You- you won’t offer it,” the boy replied sharply. There was a lesson there, Hyungsik thought, amused, about what this boy’s upbringing had been, and his understanding of how the world worked. He was convinced that he was doomed, and that he had done the crime to earn it. It never occurred to him that his crime might be far less than he realized; after all, Calisgilgati’s death, while inconvenient and likely painful, was not permanent.

But it behooved Johnny to allow the boy to go on thinking so, and so he did. He tilted his head and smiled, a strange, mad smile. “You owe me,” he said. “A life for a life, or a death for a death. Which one will it be?”

Hyungsik stepped forward and dragged the modern Doyoung with him, closer to Johnny. “Touch him,” he ordered.

“What?” Doyoung snapped.

“Touch him,” Hyungsik explained with infinite patience, which he did not possess. “And you can See into his mind, even through the past.”

“Why would I want to do that?” Doyoung said weakly.

“Now!” Hyungsik shouted, and Doyoung jumped and then extended a hand and touched Johnny’s arm.

Johnny was speaking: “I brought you here to kill you, boy, but I’ve decided to offer you leniency instead. Instead of dying here, at my command, you could take the place of my dead child, a poor substitute though you’ll be. What do you say, my little Doyoung?”

Hyungsik had only muted glimpses of whatever thoughts that Doyoung picked up from Johnny’s mind; a sudden and blazing infatuation and curiosity, a fury and a hatred, but more of an impulse to torture, beat, rape, and dominate than an impulse to kill; and desire, fierce enough to fuel the beginning of an obsession, for all that the boy before him was pathetic and scrawny and contemptible. Hyungsik realized, with an unfamiliar pang, that he could empathize, much as he was not in the habit of doing such a thing. Emin had been shivering and fragile, once.

“I’ll do it,” the boy breathed, thinking to extend his wretched life just a little longer. Hyungsik knew that Doyoung, from the perfect hindsight of the present, was viciously aware in just that moment that this boy of the past had sold not only himself but all his future reincarnations hereafter. It was a bargain that bound him to one name and one form, forever reborn, one extended memory. If he had known, he might not have done the deal; but just at that moment, it was death forestalled at the expense of slavery, and he was already well-used to slavery.

Hyungsik decided that he was satisfied, and without the first warning, he dragged Doyoung back, forcibly, into the waking world.

***

 


	5. Chapter 5

Hyungsik woke when Doyoung did, and felt it when the boy started cautiously, carefully scooting away from him, and that despite the life-saving warmth he offered.

He snorted and raised himself up on one elbow, looking at the window and the storm beyond. The storm was still in full fury, and the electricity was still out. With some effort, he dragged himself off the futon and away from Doyoung, in order to toss another couple of logs onto the fire. That done, he unhooked the I.V. from Doyoung’s arm.

Doyoung turned to watch him, still curled up in the residual warmth. “Why did you kill Park Byungho?” he asked quietly.

Hyungsik grunted. “Practice,” he said.

“Practice?” Doyoung repeated, his voice hollow.

“I needed a trial run, to make sure the basement was secure, and to see how the police in the area would react to a missing person, and all the like. That, and to feed him— the life of him— to the god. He’ll want the strength when he wakes.” He paused, and glanced around at Doyoung. “But don’t worry. You’ll be the main event.”

Doyoung curled deeper into the blankets, until only his eyes were showing. “What’s going to happen to me,” he whispered. “After you kill me?”

Hyungsik almost smiled. “What usually happens, I imagine.”

“I mean—” Doyoung coughed, a wet, sick noise. “I mean, am I still going to… am I still going to be reborn as me?”

“No,” Hyungsik said flatly. “All ties to Johnny will be cut, and you will be whatever the god wills you to be.”

“But not like Hyunjin,” Doyoung whispered.

“Probably not.” Hyungsik paused. “You will re-enter the usual system of reincarnation. Just another tiny soul.”

Doyoung coughed again, and mumbled, “So that’s what they meant,” though Hyungsik didn’t ask him who ‘they’ were, nor what they said. Instead, he reached down and seized the boy’s arm.

“Unfortunately,” he said in the droll tones of one who meant no such thing, even as he dragged Doyoung out from under the blanket and threw him over one shoulder. “I need to be getting back into town, to play the good doctor, and, more importantly, to get the electricity back. Which means that you’ll need to be kept somewhere more secure.”

He deposited Doyoung back in the cement, basement room, where Doyoung immediately tucked his knees into his chest. Hyungsik paused, there, crouching down so that their faces weren’t a foot apart, gazing at the boy. He looked small and wretched and (it was a wonder) like a doe-eyed innocent.

“You’ll wait for me, won’t you, Doyoung?” he said, with his own subtle brand of humor, and kissed Doyoung’s mouth. Doyoung jerked backwards, and Hyungsik laughed, and left.

***

A boy paced in front of him, around and around the small room, screaming and howling, smashing his fists against the door, shouting abuse until his voice was hoarse, whimpering occasionally, drinking from the sink, and pacing again. Emotions radiated from him; terror and despair and blistering hope, a breathlessly fierce desire to see his mother again, a desire so great that sometimes he could almost smell her perfume—

Doyoung listlessly observed his roommate for what seemed like hours before he realized that the boy was dead, and had been for some time. He thought he was dreaming, and only, eventually, managed to work out that he was in fact awake. With an enormous mental effort, he came to the realization that the boy in front of him, the murdered boy who looked so much like himself was a ghost or a vision. By then, he was already sliding away, his mind dissolving.

***

 

 

His consciousness didn’t stay long.

There was another vision in his head:

It was Scotland, and the year was 1910. King George V had assumed the throne of England and all the remnants of her Empire in May. As a teenager of the twenty-first century, with the impeccable perspective of hindsight, Doyoung had come to the conclusion that while there were many aspects of his second death that were regrettable to say the least, the timing was not bad at all. By jumping out of a window in February of 1911, Doyoung missed both world wars, a severe economic depression, a worldwide epidemic of the flu, and countless other events that he did not think he would have enjoyed witnessing or surviving.

Johnny summoned Doyoung into the library, where he waited by a window, watching Prince Street below.

“You’re going to seduce my brother,” he said, without ever turning to look at Doyoung. “You’re pretty, young, sweet— just his type. Best of all, he doesn’t know that you work for me.”

Doyoung thought, at the time, that he didn’t know anything about seducing anyone. But there was no point in telling Johnny that.

“What about—” he started instead, and then hesitated, swallowing hard. “Isn’t one of his followers a sybil? Won’t she See what I am, even if he doesn’t?”

Johnny smiled, brief and tight. “As it happens, my goal is to separate him from his beloved Caecilia — which is unlikely, but we’ll see what you can do. Don’t worry— Caecilia has taken it upon herself to venture into a remote village of Moldovia, to pray for the soul of a certain restless young girl there, one who has taken up the bad habit of clawing her way out of her grave at night. She won’t be around to See you for the minion that you are, and without her…” Johnny paused. “I’m sure my brother will be somewhat more vulnerable to temptation.”

Doyoung felt a certain stirring of excitement in himself. Until now, Johnny’s only use for him had been menial jobs, delivering messages and doing chores, and all of it with quite a bit of derision. 

“Just one thing,” Johnny added coldly. “Don’t let him fuck you.”

Doyoung stared at his back. He was, by then, hopelessly, futilely, unrequitedly in love. He had been since Buda, and that despite the fact that Johnny had never treated him much better than the shit tracked in from the Edinburg streets.

He did as he was instructed; he remembered that much without the aid of any vision. Johnny had given him an envelope to be delivered, and he had been waylaid on the road to London by robbers, who were almost certainly hired by Johnny. They stole almost everything from him, beat him, and broke his ankle. Not an hour later, the angel Siromitres had come along, with Lucas and other followers, as Johnny must have known that he would. They were suspicious, but they took him in and nursed him back to health. Meanwhile, Doyoung, quietly, awkwardly, went about the task of attracting Youngho. He had no better idea about how to go about it than that he should pretend to be in love, and peculiarly enough, it had worked.

He woke with a start, shivering cold. A bit desperately, he put his hands to his head and tried to call out for Johnny, again and again, tried to send some hint that gave his location, tried to send a vision of where he was. He didn’t know if this unwanted magic that Hyungsik had given him worked this way, and even if it did, he doubted he could get through whatever barrier Hyungsik had set up that kept Johnny from knowing his exact location, but he could no more will himself to give up his attempt than he could give up breathing.

He heard the footsteps this time, and he shivered, curling up closer to the wall.

Hyungsik made his way over to Doyoung, until he towered over him, effectively keeping him cornered.

“They can hear you screaming all through town,” he commented, and Doyoung went stiff.

It hadn’t occurred to him that his attempted communications with Johnny might work so well as that.

“Not that it will help your master find you,” Hyungsik added. He reached down to grab Doyoung’s arm. “Come on. Up.”

He gave Doyoung a single fleece blanket, and then dragged him outside, to the cabin’s porch, where he had clearly spent a good amount of time sweeping off the snow that had blown in during the storm. There, he sat in the rocking chair and smoked a cigarette, while Doyoung sat at his feet and shivered until he couldn’t shiver anymore. It was extraordinarily difficult to squat, with the pain in his thigh, the distinct feeling of the wound ripping open again whenever he so much as breathed. Nonetheless, the cold was the worst enemy. He kept his toes curled under his feet and his hands tucked around himself, the blanket a scant protection. It was a clear night, silent, with the characteristic vicious cold that usually followed a storm, plummeting the temperature well below zero Fahrenheit.

Hyungsik took a great breath on his cigarette. “Do you know what it was that split the twins apart?” he asked.

“No,” Doyoung said, gritting his teeth to keep them from chattering.

“Do you want to know?”

Doyoung thought about it for a good moment. “Yes,” he decided.

Hyungsik leaned forward. Doyoung glanced up at him, at the cigarette with its growing ash. “It was a girl,” Hyungsik said softly. “They both fell in love with the same girl. Some foreign slave girl, back in the Roman days. How’s that for a bit of idiocy?”

It was, Doyoung thought, almost too idiotic to be believed. “Did you See that?” he asked, and then, “Is that why Johnny Fell?”

“Only tangentially,” Hyungsik said. He took another inhale from the cigarette. “I imagine that why they broke apart in the first place isn’t the real issue. The real issue— the reason they haven’t reconciled— is that Johnny Fell. Youngho would never be able to abide by that.”

Doyoung heard himself speaking, to his own horror, before he knew what he was going to say. “I-I-I don’t understand,” His voice was small, shaking and hoarse. “How— how he can be an angel, still, when he… he… he…”

Hyungsik glanced down at him and shrugged. He put the cigarette to his lips again and inhaled, before he said, “It didn’t used to be such a crime, Doyoung, you know that. It was an act of claiming, if anything, and considering that you had just fled Johnny…”

“An angel can rape,” Doyoung said slowly. “And remain an angel. It’s not fair.” Hyungsik cut him a look. “Are we suddenly concerned with fairness, baby?”

Doyoung shuddered, suddenly and forcibly reminded of Johnny; no one else called him by endearments. Hyungsik speaking to him so made him intensely uncomfortable, and (he didn’t want to examine the feeling too much) filled him with a sort of desperate hope.

“What makes an angel or a devil is somewhat more complex than your holiday greeting cards would have you believe,” Hyungsik continued dryly. He paused for a moment before he commented, “He didn’t corrupt an innocent when he fucked you. If he had… well, that might have been different.”

“An innocent.” Doyoung looked away, out at the freshly fallen snow and the dark night. From the view of trees and mountains here, he couldn’t even guess which way town might be, let alone where they were.

Hyungsik exhaled a cloud of smoke. He was speaking before it was completely free of his lungs, creating swirling patterns. “One might make the theological argument that he was delivering you from evil, and any and all acts so involved were the justifiable means to a justified end.”

It was a long time before Doyoung spoke, his teeth chattering regardless of his best efforts. “You’re a doctor who smokes.”

“If lung cancer was going to get me, it would’ve done so a long time ago,” Hyungsik said gravely. “Hold out your arm.”

Doyoung cringed, but he did it, and Hyungsik buried the cigarette butt into the flesh of his forearm.

Back inside, Hyungsik once again wrapped Doyoung, who was too cold to shiver, in the furs and the comforter, and once again hooked him up to an I.V.

He turned away, and he dreamed.

***

He had only ever asked Youngho about his brother once.

The night was threatening a storm, he remembered that much, with the screaming Scottish wind lashing at the estate’s windows and doors. He had been curled up close to the fire, his hands clutched around his calf as he experimentally rolled his freshly healed ankle. The bruising of the break still colored his skin green, and the muscles had atrophied during his recovery. When he rolled the joint, it was not so much painful as it was stiff, unwieldy, every movement popping and cracking. He winced when he felt a tendon pinched.

Youngho sat nearby, in an armchair, with the week’s copy of The Scotsman folded in one hand, watching Doyoung’s ministrations with careful eyes.

“That was a bad break,” he commented. “You’re lucky to even have the movement you’ve got thus far.”

Doyoung grimaced at those words and eyed his injured left leg. “Is it not going to get much better than this?” He imagined his new life limping around as he did Johnny’s bidding. He did not, he thought unpleasantly, need anything more to add to his already pathetic state in the eyes of Johnny’s family.

“With a bit of practice, every day, you’ll gain more mobility,” Youngho said. He moved suddenly— Doyoung jumped— and sat down closer to the boy. Carefully, he took the injured limb in hand. Doyoung tried not to shudder. Youngho's hands were big, and warm, and Doyoung could admit to himself that he had indulged in certain fantasies of those hands on his skin. But the limb, recently broken, recently grotesque with swelling, edema, and misplaced bruising, soft with the sweat of the cast, felt repulsively vulnerable. He was seized by a sudden urge to punch or kick or bite Youngho.

Even as he smothered down the instinct, his ankle filled with a certain tingling warmth. Doyoung sat up quickly. “Are you…?”

Youngho moved his hands away. The warmth remained, but the ankle didn’t look any different.

Doyoung shook his head to clear it. He lapsed into silence, and Youngho seemed content to let him go.

Eventually, he spoke. “Is it true— Nairn told me— is it true that you— that you ventured down into hell, once?”

From the outside perspective of the vision, Doyoung winced. He hated listening to himself stammer.

Youngho considered him, dark-eyed, even as Doyoung carefully avoided his gaze. “There are many hells,” he commented in a low voice. “There are hells and then there are hells, do you take my meaning? There are places where the dead rest, for the time being, and there are… other places.” He paused. “I’ve stepped into any number of hells, as a guest or a visitor, but as for the story Nairn is likely thinking of…” A smile twisted on his lips, briefly. ‘That was my brother, not me.” Doyoung held his breath.

In the vision, there was the flash of yet another, burning before his eyes if only for a moment— a red angel, still young, holding a lantern out in front of himself like a sword for the fighting, as he walked down the hallway of a massive cave, the walls flickering red with half-formed images of torture.

And there was another vision, with it— two sparrows on a tree branch, side by side and frozen stiff because they had not flown south for winter.

“Is that when he Fell?” Doyoung asked Youngho. His voice was not much more than a squeak, and he was deeply, horribly afraid; afraid that these questions would offend Youngho and raise the man’s wrath, afraid that somehow, even the mention of Johnny would reveal Doyoung’s true nature and his purpose in Johnny’s home.

He was, he realized from the perspective of the vision, simply afraid of Youngho.

“Oh, no,” Youngho said, seemingly never noticing Doyoung’s anxiety. “That was years before.” He paused, considering. “But it did change him, that trip…”

The vision was dissolving, and a new one was taking its place.

This one came like a fever, wracking through him, hazing and vicious and confused. He was returned, to that strange spring day, when he had gone to Johnny to report his success with Youngho.

It was a dangerous thing, to return to Johnny’s Edinburgh apartment; if Youngho had discovered it, all his hard work would have been for nothing, and, he suspected, there would be hell to pay for Youngho's fury. He was nervous, therefore, twitching and pacing in the dusty receiving room, when Johnny finally came out to meet him.

Johnny was in something of a happy disarray, his clothes hastily pulled on, his red hair mussed, the hints of smeared rouge on his face, his hands. There was an affair, Doyoung remembered vaguely, with some pretty, married countess; Doyoung couldn’t quite remember her name, but her perfume clung to Johnny in that receiving room. There was always an affair with someone, Doyoung knew. A green-eyed aristocrat, a shy nun, an eccentric young scholar at the university, a married countess; rather, there was always an affair when Johnny was in a good way. When his schemes were not going well, when he grew angry and paranoid and more vicious than usual, he cut off such relations and focused instead on whatever his goal of the moment was. He did not care much, male or female, but he liked his lovers young, vivacious, pretty, and with status.

Doyoung was so distracted trying to remember the name of the countess (she had been charming, he remembered, and not at all in love with Johnny, or even truly interested in his demonism; but she had disapproved of the way he treated Doyoung— and so, Doyoung had liked her. But nothing damaged one’s memory quite like dying, and he couldn’t recall her name no matter how he tried) that he didn’t realize he could sense Johnny’s thoughts and emotions through the vision until it hit him, quite suddenly. Johnny gazed down at this pathetic scrap of a servant of his, a pretty whore in more lives than one, and felt a twisted longing, one he would barely even allow himself to acknowledge.

Doyoung twisted the sleeve of his shirt between his fingers, with nothing more than nerves and a certain squirming longing in himself, and said, “I did what you told me to do.”

That was not strictly true. He said it in French: “C’est— C’est fait. Comme vous m’avez dit.”

“You did what?” Johnny asked impassively, immediately switching to Scottish Gaelic. Doyoung had been born in Arles. As a child, relocated to Yorkshire, where he had had to learn English, to his great dismay; and as a teenager, he had been taken to Scotland, and Glasgow, at Johnny’s bequest, where he learned Gaelic. Gaelic was at least an improvement on English, though he still spoke French whenever he could.

In the past, Doyoung looked down at the carpeted floor. In the vision, he could see himself, and he could keep watching Johnny’s masked face. He could feel the flare of emotion on Johnny’s part, the anger and a certain, unhappy triumph.

“You told me,” Doyoung said slowly, in Gaelic, “To go to live in your brother’s house, and to seduce him, out of the arms of the seeress. I came here to tell you that I have done it.” He risked a glance up at Johnny’s face, and Doyoung realized, through the past, to his own groaning dismay, that he was looking for some sort of parental approval on Johnny’s face, some sort of job-well-done.

“He’s broken it off with Caecilia?” Johnny asked neutrally.

“No. Not yet. He has not… has not contacted her in perhaps a week or so, that I know of.”

“Then how is it you’re so sure of your success?”

“He told me that he is in love with me,” Doyoung said simply. He kept the memory at bay, the awkward conversation in the pantry that culminated in his ducking under Youngho arm in order to avoid a kiss, the warring triumph and mild horror that had seized him at Youngho's words— while he did want to successfully complete the task he had been given, the fact of the matter was that Youngho still scared him, even, or especially, when professing love.

“Of course he is,” Johnny said, with a bite of temper. “He likes them like you— ingénues who, underneath those big, teary eyes and those quivering bottom lips, are secretly whores.”

Doyoung, to his credit, knew when things were going wrong, and knew when Johnny’s mood was quickly veering towards rage and his occasional, characteristic madness. “So, you knew it would work.”

Johnny said nothing for a moment too long, and Doyoung felt in him, through the vision, not just a longing, but certain fury and viciousness, a desire to hurt.

More than all of that, there was jealousy, so strong that Doyoung nearly thought he could smell it, sharp in the air. So Hyunjin was right after all, he thought. And, as much as it pained him to admit it, Hyungsik.

Doyoung opened his mouth to say something else— he didn’t know what, but anything to end the silence— and Johnny said, brutally, “Did you let him fuck you?”

“Non,” Doyoung snapped, before he remembered the language. And then, “You— you told me not to.”

“So I did. Did you betray us? Give away any secrets? Did you tell him about all your past lives and how unkind to you I’ve been? How I made you a scapegoat and a whipping boy, how you disappointed me in old Prague and how I let you die in a fire in Buda, or how you bungled your tasks with Yura? You’ve so many stories to share with my brother, sweetheart, so many things to bond over—”

“No,” Doyoung repeated, his voice louder than he intended. “No, I didn’t tell him anything, I didn’t say anything, I didn’t— I didn’t betray you— I did what you told me to—”

From the hindsight of the vision, Doyoung wanted to turn away. He didn’t want to see himself desperate like this. He didn’t want to hear that cry in his voice. He didn’t want to know just where this was going, and what it would come to.

And so, for better or worse, he reached out to touch Johnny instead, to seek out his thoughts.

Johnny was a storm of fury— that much was expected. The sensations caught Doyoung by surprise, and the vividness of the imagery. Johnny wanted to throttle him, wanted to put his hands around that slim, white neck and squeeze until those Dyoung-bunny eyes went back in his head, he wanted to beat him, pummel him, until there were white bones jutting out of his flesh like so many broken matchsticks, wanted to bite the flesh of his neck, his shoulder, his nipple, his flank, until his mouth was filled with blood. He wanted to hear the stupid boy screaming instead of whining or stammering, he wanted blood caked between his fingers, and the smell of blood thick in his nose, the taste of blood in his mouth. More than that— not unconnected to that— he wanted to see the boy naked, wanted the slim frame held down under his hands, wanted to pry him lewdly open and thrust into that tight, wet heat.

So, why didn’t he? Doyoung wondered, a little vaguely. There was nothing stopping Johnny from doing exactly what he wanted to Doyoung, be it a bloody murder or a rape. There would not be any consequences, or any retribution; there was no higher authority to tell Johnny no.

From there, the scene dissolved, into Johnny’s fury (and jealousy, he now knew) and Doyoung’s own mix of confusion, bewilderment, anger, and above all, fear. Doyoung bolted from the house when he couldn’t stand Johnny’s rage a moment longer, and took off literally running, as fast as his newly healed ankle would let him, and Johnny let him go.

He remembered being surprised at the time that Johnny didn’t stop him, from running out of the room let alone the apartment let alone Edinburgh. Now, he could sense Johnny’s logic; Johnny’s own desperation, that he needed to calm down, get his head together, get himself thinking straight. If he were to look at the situation in a detached, clinical way, it presented numerous opportunities to get the upper hand against his brother; he was simply finding an emotionally removed approach somewhat difficult at the moment. From this small window into Johnny’s mind, Doyoung learned that taking a detached approach to dealing with Doyoung was something Johnny found himself struggling with alarmingly frequently.

But the vision was dissolving, quickly, brutally, and Doyoung realized just where it was going; to that confession, in front of Youngho.

He did not want to see this, even less than he had wanted to see the previous, and he certainly did not want to know what had been going on in Youngho's head. The vision took him to the main room of that countryside manor, where he was on his knees in front of the unlit fireplace, and Youngho stood, towering over him. He was shivering already, his skin chafed in that brutal Scottish wind, his hair whipped into elflocks. He was babbling out the story, explaining everything, explaining that he was Johnny’s minion, that he had been sent to trick Youngho, that he was sorry, that he wanted help, that he wanted to be better.

Doyoung was only half listening, but he did notice that it sounded better than he was afraid it might. He framed his mission in terms of gaining entry into Youngho's home and inner circle and gaining Youngho's trust, rather than a seduction. He framed his request for assistance in terms of wanting redemption, rather than wanting to hide from Johnny while Johnny raged. He didn’t let on that his change of heart was inspired not by his own conscience but by Johnny’s unprovoked fury. And Youngho listened to all of it, his face an expressionless mask, implacable, unmoving.

What made Doyoung truly squirm, through the perspective of the vision, was knowing that for all that he feared Youngho, his fear was misaligned. He was terrified that Youngho would rage and hurt or kill him, strike him. It had never occurred to him that Youngho might do what he did instead.

Even then, he knew that there were shades of goodness and evilness, and there was a certain, angelic side to goodness that meant doing what was to be done regardless of the ugliness involved. Youngho's goodness was a frequently merciless one, not kindness, but a stance against evil. The angel had a streak of brutality and an uncompromising harshness to his person that rivaled most demons. When his gaze turned onto evildoers and devils such as his brother and his brother’s followers, he would perform acts of untold violence and viciousness. In all, Doyoung knew that Youngho was fully capable of hurting him.

Even so, he misestimated. Until far too late, Doyoung thought of Youngho as Youngho presented himself, as being like stone and untouched by the wild moods and desires that so infected his brother.

Youngho accused him, in a voice flat with anger, of treachery. Doyoung agreed, and begged forgiveness. He bowed at Youngho feet throughout the whole of the confession, but at this, he crouched down, his forehead to the cold floor, breathless with fear.

Youngho stepped forward and grabbed his arm.

He hauled Doyoung to his feet, and then, of all unexpected things, he kissed him. When Doyoung protested, in shock, Youngho broke off the kiss and dragged him, stumbling and weakly protesting, upstairs, up to one of the guest bedrooms.

The bedspread smelled of dust and must; he remembered that. He remembered the disbelieving realization of what was going to happen to him, as Youngho stripped him. He had not been raped since from Kibum, in Buda, since he was barely more than a child.

He didn’t go easily. He fought, viciously, kicking and thrashing and elbowing, and when Youngho defeated that with sheer, brute strength, he bit at his arm and tried to stab fingers into Youngho's eyes. Youngho pinned him down, and then pinned him open.

He remembered the endurance as being astonishing, and the pain agonizing, as Youngho thrust into him again and again. Doyoung twisted and tried to struggle away. He sobbed, and cursed Youngho through gasped, choking breaths, when he wasn’t pleading, while Youngho murmured to him about damnation and salvation and submission, and comforted him. “Only a little while longer,” he breathed, when his thrusting grew ever more brutal, pressing into the center of him. In one hand, he held Doyoung’s wrists tight enough to bruise, but he rubbed his thumb across the skin of Doyoung’s palm in a way that was meant to be soothing.

In a detached, clinical way, provided by the vision, Doyoung wondered if Youngho had truly injured him during the rape. It was not at all impossible; Youngho had struck him, more than once, to subdue him, and he was certainly strong enough to break bones with his grip. Doyoung wondered if any ribs had been cracked, or if the bones of his wrist crushed, if his shoulder had been strained, or if his flesh had ripped, worse than it appeared (there was certainly blood to show for it). In the end, none of it mattered.

As soon as he was done, Youngho left him, with the promise to keep him. He might have thought that Doyoung was subdued, and Doyoung, sniffling and quiet, likely gave that impression. Even if Youngho knew better, he didn’t have much choice in the matter. Nairn was knocking on the door and proclaiming in an alarmed voice that Johnny had come to the manor looking for a fight.

When the footsteps had faded down the stairs, Doyoung dragged himself up, out of the bloodied bed. He dressed limbs that ached and wouldn’t quite obey his commands, and as Youngho had gone down the stairs, he went up. Up, to the attic, and the window.

Finally, the vision released him.

***


	6. Chapter 6

Doyoung woke to find himself sprawled out on the bathroom floor, with Hyungsik frowning down at him.

“Have you decided to join the living?” Hyungsik asked, with a touch of humor that didn’t suit him.

Doyoung felt different. Specifically, he felt as if he were lighter, as if the bonds that held together the atom that made his flesh were weakening, in danger of coming apart. He glanced down at his left arm, half expecting to see an I.V., and saw not only the evidence of several past I.V.s, in the bruised track marks, but several more cigarette burns. His stomach twisted when he realized he’d lost time.

“What day is it?” he asked, his voice croaking.

“Up,” Hyungsik said, ignoring the question, grabbing his uninjured right arm and dragging him to his feet. Pain shot through his left thigh, from the center of his back through his knee, and he whimpered.

Hyungsik deposited him back on the futon. Doyoung wanted the I.V., but Hyungsik made no move for it.

Instead, he carefully, as if handling the most fragile of patients, turned Doyoung over, onto his stomach, and then coaxed him up onto his knees. He wouldn’t have been able to stay, if Hyungsik hadn’t held him up, with one arm around his hips. His other hand coaxed Doyoung’s legs open.

Doyoung kept his face on the blankets, and cooperated. This wasn’t like Youngho; he didn’t have any energy to fight. He didn’t even think he had the energy to stay conscious, no matter how Hyungsik brutalized him. If he had wanted to kick, or struggle, or even try to twist away, Hyungsik could have simply put a hand to the wound on his thigh, and Doyoung was vividly aware of it.

Doyoung waited to feel something nudging at him, and what would inevitably follow. Instead, Hyungsik leaned over him, keeping him up on his knees through main strength alone.

“There’s something about you, Doyoung,” Hyungsik murmured in his ear. “I could keep you here forever, a cherished pet, and I don’t think I would ever get sick of you…”

He couldn’t, Doyoung thought resentfully; ‘forever’ was coming to an abrupt close, between the starvation and the wound, and if he had any luck to him at all, he’d be dead before Hyungsik had a chance to sacrifice him to Enemessar’s awakening.

“You said you couldn’t stand to touch me,” he groused, and flinched when he felt fingers, oily, touch him.

“I changed my mind,” Hyungsik murmured, and he sounded amused.

Hyungsik prepared him, slowly, carefully, and Doyoung tried to accommodate him. He’d had enough pain, and enough illness, and he knew better than to think he was going to fight this. Peculiarly, the sexuality of the act seemed like a distant thing, unreal. He tried to keep his thighs open, but his flesh was cold, stiff, unyielding, as if it already belonged to a corpse. It was agony when Hyungsik finally pushed into him. When he didn’t have the strength to stay on his knees, Hyungsik laid him down, flat on his stomach, his legs uncomfortably wide open, and thrust into him, moving in slow, languid strikes. Doyoung did his best not to feel it; how big Hyungsik was, or how hot, inside of him. The massive weight on his back, or the sweat that was all his because Doyoung was still far too cold.

He drifted in and out of unconsciousness, returning to that room, with Youngho, wishing he could wake from both, and find himself in his own bed, at home. He didn’t.

***

Hyungsik returned him to the basement room later that night. Doyoung fell back into that vision with Youngho, relived a second time, and this time, the vision continued all the way up to the moment he jumped out of the window.

This time, he lingered on, even after he was splattered on the pavement. It was an unpleasant sight, far worse than Park Byungho’s murder; Hyungsik had least had the good grace to keep Byungho relatively compact. Doyoung looked down at himself, at the broken bones and spread guts, and saw the broken chest rising and falling with quickly inhaled breaths; saw eyes, cloudy with blood, fluttering, and the mouth gaping. Worse, he saw some form of consciousness, and awareness in those eyes, though it was certainly not a full consciousness. He was glad he couldn’t remember whatever was going through his mind then.

Everyone gathered around, to wait and watch him die. Nairn and Lucas, Youngho's followers, as well as Victoria, who was surprisingly somber at the sight, and a number of servants besides. Even Youngho and Johnny put aside their fighting for just a moment, and to stare down at the broken thing, and wait for it to die. In the vision, Doyoung was most interested in their reactions.

Youngho did not quite have his usual expressionless mask. There was a peculiar, disturbed look on his face. He knew the part he had in this, even if the decisions, to come to this place, and later, to jump, were all Doyoung’s. Doyoung realized that hadn’t foreseen this— that no one had. He had finally managed to do something truly unexpected, perhaps for the first time.

Johnny was quiet, his face closer to blank than Youngho’s, his usually sleepy eyes dull. He had had any number of plans, and any number of desires, and Doyoung had put an abrupt end to all of them. Even then, before Doyoung gasped out his last, wet, sputtered breaths on the pavement, there was a seed in Johnny’s breast, an anger that would eventually turn into a raging fury.

Doyoung tried to struggle free of it— death, and visions— and he returned once again to that moment, when Youngho threw him down on the bed, to relive the rape again.

He didn’t want this. He tried to struggle free of the vision, even as his past self ineffectually tried to struggle free of Youngho, and he found himself thinking that this was why seers went mad.

He was still attempting to struggle through the vision when something changed. He felt it, an alien, outsider touch, something breaking into his mind— gently, but he had no defenses to speak of, not with the sickness and the relentless visions and dreams. His first thought that it was Hyungsik, and he skittered away from the sensation, until he felt the touch, and it was a distinctly feminine touch.

Visions wracked him, of horrible things; a tree that grew human eyes like berries, a black door with corpses piled up against it, a valley of bones ranging in size from ribs of unknown beasts that towered two stories high to the skulls of mice that would crunch underfoot, a skinny girl dragging herself muddy-haired out of a shallow patch of earth in the dark, an abandoned well that pulsed with a wretched sort of wrongness…

Doyoung pulled himself away and curled up. The touch, whatever it was, vanished, and it took its visions with it.

He did not rest for long. The door came open with a crash, and Hyungsik came down the stairs.

There was a sense of urgency to him that Doyoung had not seen before.

In just that moment, he looked like Bjarnmothr; vicious and cruel, and utterly raving mad. Fully capable of breaking a body open on the altar, or beating someone to death with a staff, or merely his bare hands. Doyoung curled up on himself, putting his arms over his head in anticipation of that first blow.

Instead, Hyungsik grabbed Doyoung’s arm and dragged him up, onto feet that wouldn’t hold his weight, and half dragged, half carried him back up the stairs. Doyoung was mumbling questions, protestations, but he wasn’t even listening to himself, and his noises certainly didn’t concern Hyungsik.

Amongst the sudden excitement, he fainted, to visions of a trembling and a stirring beneath the ground. He woke to find himself in the passenger seat of a pick-up truck, wrapped in that same fleece blanket. His eyes burned in the sudden sunlight, and he shivered worse than ever.

He was stunned, but not so out of sorts that it didn’t occur to him to reach, with one trembling hand, for the knob to turn up the heat. It was a useless endeavor; his whole arm shook, and his fingers, scrabbling like slow, thick claws, wouldn’t obey his commands to grasp the knob.

Just then, Hyungsik slipped into the driver’s seat. He turned the key in the ignition, coaxing the engine into life, and then turned the heat up as much as it would go, brushing Doyoung’s hand out of the way. With that, he drove the truck out onto the road. Doyoung watched in utter bemusement. The drive was slow, given the ice and snow thick on the road, but Hyungsik seemed to have a certain impatience to him.

“Where…” Doyoung started, and then it occurred to him. “It’s already time? For the sacrifice?”

Hyungsik didn’t answer, his eyes on the road. Doyoung, considering the matter, thought that his theory didn’t seem quite right. Hyungsik was rushing, and unprepared. The time for the sacrifice wouldn’t have caught him by surprise.

The man drove through twisting mountain paths, until he finally came to a stop, seemingly randomly, along one steep hillside. He pulled Doyoung out of the car, with a heavy coat thrown under one arm, and carried him uphill, into the woods.

“Another storm is coming,” he commented, at one point, glancing up at the sky. Doyoung didn’t answer, shivering. To his eyes, the world was too bright to tell if the sky was cloudy or clear. “Just my damn luck.” The snow was already easily as deep as Hyungsik’s knees, but he trudged through it, unperturbed.

They came to a small cave, carved out of the cliffside like a cavity in a tooth. They had to duck underneath the overhanging entrance, where the trees grew stunted and their roots created a tangled, curtain thick with snow hanging before the cave. Hyungsik carried Doyoung inside, and set him down, wrapping him in the over-large coat, with chemical heating pads placed inside, next to Doyoung’s heart. “I don’t have time to make a fire or anything of the sort,” he murmured, even as he pulled the hood up, over Doyoung’s head. “I’ll be gone for an hour or so, to get some supplies together. Be a good boy and don’t be dead by the time I get back to you, all right?” He almost smiled.

He put a hand on Doyoung’s head, like a benediction, and with that, he was gone, back to the truck.

The first thought that occurred to Doyoung was that he was, technically, free; no longer locked in a basement, or handcuffed, or anything of the like. He tried to jump to his feet, fell onto his side, and discovered just how weak he really was; barely able to move, and naked but for the coat.

He slept, again. He dreamed of his first death, trapped in that dilapidated home by the demon hunters, as smoke filled the room, as he crouched in the middle of the floor, as the heat rose like threatening hellfire—

— What he wouldn’t give, he thought, to be warm again—

Someone shook him. He opened his eyes, expecting Hyungsik, and found himself staring up at Jaehyun.

Doyoung’s slowed cognition, a result of his general weakness, left him utterly unprepared to deal with a surprise of this magnitude. He gaped up at Jaehyun, entirely stunned, unable to even register that this was true and not a vision, even as Jaehyun snapped his fingers in front of Doyoung’s face and barked, “Are you awake? Come on, Doyoung hyung, please, get your shit together, please…”

What managed to penetrate through the fog in Doyoung’s mind was that Jaehyun’s breath came in great exhaled clouds of steam. His face was set in lines of worry, which Doyoung had simply never seen before, and his eyes were dark, darting around the cave and back to Doyoung, prone beneath him. He yanked off a glove and pressed it into Doyoung’s throat. For a moment, Doyoung was sure he was about to be throttled, and truly wondered why he was still breathing, until Jaehyun mumbled, “Pulse is too slow. Way too slow. Come on, hyung, let’s get you up, please…” He seized Doyoung’s arm and started, inexorably, dragging him to his feet.

Doyoung managed to find his voice, barely. “Can’t— can’t-can’t— can’t walk,” he stammered out, so hoarsely, there was no voice to it.

“I can see that,” Jaehyun said, glancing down at the fluid dripping down Doyoung’s left leg, which came as a rather great surprise to Doyoung. It seemed that the bandage had come free at some point when Hyungsik was bringing him here.

Jaehyun grabbed him and tossed him over his shoulder. Doyoung hadn’t a moment of time to complain before Jaehyun was moving, stomping through the heavy snow and underbrush, and cursing the snow and cold and winter and Doyoung himself with every step. There was a car at the road (just where Hyungsik’s truck had been, Doyoung thought dizzily) and Jaehyun deposited him into the backseat. The warmth was like an oven compared to the outside, but Doyoung remained cold, deep in the heart of himself. He shook and shivered, and vanished again into unconsciousness, even as he felt the car moving.

***


	7. Chapter 7

Doyoung stood in a garden. Every plant was dead, dried husks of what had once been morning glories and gardenias and forget-me-nots and a thousand more. In death, all had gone the same desiccated color of wet sand. The sky overhead was a November slate gray, pregnant in waiting for winter. Doyoung held his breath, and so did the season.

Above him, in the dead apple trees, were a hundred or a thousand birds, in grays and whites and browns and blacks, crowding for room on the branch, disappearing and reappearing from behind the rotten remains of apples and the dried leaves clinging to the branch. Theirs was a cacophony of unorganized sound, a squabbling and a shouting. It grew noisier as they grew more energetic, and Doyoung closed his eyes and disappeared into the explosion of wings that was a bird taking flight and the screams uttered in feathered throats.

Consciousness was a strange thing.

In a dream that was far less clear to him than birds in a garden, a man’s form gathered him up, as one does a pile of loose papers, and took him away. There was nothing, for a time, and then:

Water.

He woke.

He lay, naked, and shivering in a bathtub, submerged in warm water. Not any bathtub (he realized sluggishly, and in disbelief), but his own bathtub, stout and claw-footed and ancient as it was. He kicked out, a bit wildly, and water splashed. The ceiling overhead seemed impossibly far away and wavered uncertainly in his vision, refusing to come into focus.

A woman’s voice that was only marginally familiar floated over to him. “You could always summon up an imp to take care of him.” There was annoyance in the tone.

“I could.” This voice, immediately recognized, was Johnny. At the sound, Doyoung’s back seized up uncontrollably, and arched. He sank under the water and a vision put its teeth into him like dog worrying a corpse, a vision of a red snake striking a sparrow and consuming it whole in only a few muscled gulps; and in its throat and through its flesh, the bird twitched and struggled and became a pulsing heart in the breast of the serpent. Over all, Johnny’s voice spoke, sharply sarcastic. “I could just let him die, of course— that’s another option, isn’t it?”

 _I am going to die_ , Doyoung thought. He was going to drown. After everything Hyungsik had done, everything he had survived (and not survived, if he counted his previous lives), he was going to drown in his own bathtub, because he couldn’t force the muscles of his back to relax enough to save his own life.

He heard heavy footsteps, and then there was a hand on his neck dragging his head up, above the water. He sucked in breath, and opened his eyes to see Johnny overhead. He looked even bigger than he had ever before, and Doyoung quailed.

“I guess that’s enough time in the water,” Johnny said darkly, and pulled Doyoung up, in order to yank up the plug.

Victoria had followed him into the bathroom, and was gazing down at Doyoung, but without quite the vehemence of her usual dislike. “It’s astonishing he’s still alive,” she commented, as if he were an inanimate object, or still unconscious. “Between the amount of weight he lost and his temperature when Jaehyun found him… are those cigarette burns on his arm?”

Johnny picked him up, single-armed, out of the bathtub and wrapped him in the towel. He had no sooner placed Doyoung on his feet than Doyoung saw black spots in his eyes and his bad leg collapsed under him like a house of cards under the weight of a brick. He fell, and Johnny caught him.

He felt, more than saw, Johnny frowning down at the wound in his thigh. “Victoria,” he started, “Make yourself useful and find a pair of tweezers in the medicine cabinet, would you?”

“Is now the time for that?” Victoria asked archly, but she did as he asked, while Johnny sat down on the edge of the bathtub, Doyoung in his lap.

Doyoung had some faint notion that he should be protesting. Johnny was about to do something to the wound, he deduced, and he had a distinct preference that the wound should be left entirely alone, preferably to the point where he could pretend it had never existed. But he felt too far away to find his voice, and even if he could, he was so used to obeying Johnny that he wouldn’t have known the words to say.

That changed quite abruptly when Johnny, with fingers, a small knife from Doyoung’s kitchen, and the pair of tweezers Victoria had found, dug into the wound. He swung an arm around wildly, trying to connect his elbow into Johnny’s face. Johnny ducked out of the way easily, and went back to his task without any comment. Doyoung was too weak and disoriented to give him much more trouble.

Despite any struggling and attempts to break free, Johnny managed to pull out each of the stitches from the infected flesh. He blotted at the wound with paper towels, and then bandaged it, just as the sound of birdsong floated from the kitchen. Doyoung jerked unpleasantly, sure that another vision was starting, but Victoria startled. “That’s my phone,” she announced, excusing herself.

“Well,” Johnny murmured, picking Doyoung up. He carried the boy into his bedroom.

Doyoung noticed the changes immediately. All of his aunt’s plaid woolen blankets had been pulled out of their storage place under the bed and layered over the quilts and comforter. Next to the bedside table, an I.V. stand had been set up, the bag of clear saline solution hanging down in waiting. Across from the bed, on the other side of the room, someone had stacked up as much firewood as would fit in the corner of the room, just barely a safe distance from the stove. The stove itself glowed orange and hot through the grate, with the familiar look of having been working hard for hours.

More startling still was the fact that the room had been decorated for Christmas. White lights and gold tinsel hung round the ceiling, while thick garlands of colored lights circled the windows. Painted glass ornaments hung from the strands of lights.

Red velvet stockings trimmed with white lace hung from the knobs of the drawers of the dresser, and a red, fur-trimmed Santa hat adorned the nearby lamp. The bookshelf had been garnished with tinsel, and adorned with any number of ornaments, including a fake Christmas tree of about a foot high on top, next to a snow globe holding the city of Paris in its belly, and a ceramic squirrel holding a star aloft between its paws. Further down, Doyoung saw nutcrackers and glass angels and wooden Father Christmases.

He recognized the Christmas decorations. They had all belonged to his aunt once, or his mother, and the last he knew, they had been stored away in the very back of his closet, contained in a handful of cardboard boxes and tupperware containers.

Johnny tucked Doyoung into the bed, but pulled out his arm. Doyoung, still gaping at the Christmas decorations, hardly noticed as the devil grimaced when looking at the cigarette burns and the bruised track marks. He found a vein in the back of Doyoung’s hand and slid the needle into it before taping the tube down. That done, he retrieved a first aid kit from the kitchen and saw to the burns and track marks, disinfecting each one before wrapping them neatly in bandages. Doyoung watched him without much interest.

He jumped when Johnny sat up and reached over to seize his jaw. “Did he take your tongue?” he asked, and Doyoung jerked back. “How about I get you something to eat? Will you talk then?”

“Yes,” Doyoung said immediately.

He came back with (to Doyoung’s intense disappointment) a glass of milk. He took it without comment anyway, and made to gulp it all down, but that Johnny stopped him and made him drink more slowly.

Victoria stepped into the room. “That was Mark,” she said, indicating her phone. “Neither he nor Jaehyun has seen even the first sign of Bjarnmothr— but the storm is getting worse.” She hesitated, just for a moment. “Youngho is out searching as well.”

“Is she still refusing to help?” Johnny asked, turning to face her.

“She says her part is done,” Victoria replied. “Meihui hasn’t been able to persuade her.”

With Johnny’s attention on Victoria, Doyoung seized the opportunity to drink the rest of the milk as fast as he could. By the time Johnny turned back to him, it was gone. “Is there more?” he asked, and winced at the sound of his voice; it was barely more than a whimper, and he sounded young and childish.

Johnny pulled the glass out of his hands with some irritation and turned back to Victoria. “No one’s going to find anything in this storm,” he said. “Tell them to get back to the hotel and wait it out— and I imagine you’d rather be there as well?”

Something flickered in the back of Victoria’s eyes. “This apartment is very cramped,” she admitted.

She looked at Doyoung.

With no more prompt than that, a vision seized Doyoung and laid him flat.

**

Doyoung woke, and for one terrible moment, his stomach seized up. He thought he was going to vomit, until the nausea dissipated and his muscles relaxed.

He opened his eyes to see Johnny frowning down at him, and Victoria, across the room looking far more alarmed. “What—” he mumbled.

“You had a seizure,” Johnny said. He looked suspicious. “Another one.”

“Do you need me to stay?” Victoria asked.

“No,” Doyoung said loudly.

Johnny grinned, briefly. “No. Get yourself back to the hotel before this storm gets any worse.”

She nodded, and went, and it was no small relief to Doyoung to have her out of his space.

“You, too,” Doyoung mumbled at Johnny, his eyes half closed in exhaustion.

“What was that?” Johnny demanded.

“You. Leave. Too,” Doyoung said, trying to be clear and slurring his words instead.

That got a laugh out of Johnny. “And leave you to die?” he asked affectionately. He reached over— Doyoung cringed— and brushed the hair out of Doyoung’s eyes.

Doyoung’s vision went black. In a flash, there was a fantasy in his mind, Johnny’s fantasy, in vivid, breath-taking detail, as he imagined bending Doyoung over the kitchen table and gently but forcefully fucking him— and Doyoung, in the fantasy (with an energy that amazed him, and seemed totally impossible) squirmed and whimpered and cried out and even screamed with pleasure—

Waking was like coming up for air.

Johnny was very still. His usually sleepy eyes were uncannily alert, and he asked, with a quiet precision, “Did Bjarnmothr give you the Sight, Doyoung?” Before Doyoung could even think of if or how to lie, he added, “Tell me the truth.” It was a command.

“Yes,” Doyoung whispered.

The silence lasted an uncomfortably long time. “Well,” Johnny said finally. “That does make you more useful.” His eyes narrowed. “What have you seen?”

Doyoung answered before he could be prompted to tell the truth. “Mostly my suicide. Over and over again…”

“Mostly?” Johnny repeated flatly.

Doyoung stared up at him with big eyes. “Can I have more milk?” he asked. “Or… or… there should be other food— in the—”

“Later,” Johnny said darkly. “For now, get some rest.”

“I’m hungry,” Doyoung insisted.

“Later,” Johnny said flatly. “And that’s the end of this argument,” he added, sharply enough that Doyoung subsided.

He was, he could admit, as exhausted as he was hungry, and still shivering. He lay back, before Johnny could order him to do it, and glanced over at the devil. The last thing he saw was Johnny, lost in thought, gazing at Doyoung as if he had never truly seen him before.

***

The dreams continued, relentless as if he had never left Hyungsik’s cabin.

He ran through the woods on bare feet, leaving bloody footprints tracked in the snow. The world was a blurred but fever- bright whirl around him, in the sharp clean scent of the air, the decaying smells of wood and frost, the roughness of bark under his fingers, and the bite of cold in the wind. He ran and a bear chased him— but it was not a bear but a madman, a madman who laughed and called his name, though which name it was, Doyoung couldn’t hear.

He was sprawled out in the snow, in the cold, and Hyungsik crouched over him, claws raking through Doyoung’s guts and tearing him loose. He was trying to scream, but he had no voice, and his breath puffed out into the air in cream clouds. Hyungsik sank his teeth into Doyoung’s intestines, his liver and kidneys and gallbladder and spleen, and tore the meat of him. Doyoung, breathlessly, soundlessly, helplessly, screamed and screamed.

Somehow, he noticed that the bear was no longer eating him; had never been eating him. Instead, Hyungsik had mounted him and was slowly, brutally fucking him. As he rode him, Doyoung saw shuffling dark wings in the corners of his vision, but he squinted his eyes closed and—

Johnny shook him.

“Nightmare, darling?” he asked, in his usual amused but bored drawl. “Sit up.”

He had taken out the I.V and left a band-aid in its place. For all the nightmares, Doyoung did feel a bit better, and he brightened considerably when he saw that Johnny had a mug and a plate in hand.

The plate contained a single egg, scrambled, which Doyoung gulped down, despite Johnny’s warnings. The tea was a darjeeling, one of the those that Hyunjin had bought for him, and there was an ice cube rapidly melting in its enter, as well as the distinctly sweet smells of cream and honey.

Doyoung put it to his lips and drank. It burned its way, his tongue and his bottom lip and the roof of his mouth, and burned all the way down his throat and into his stomach. “This is the best tea I’ve ever tasted,” he said, and meant it. Johnny didn’t smile.

“I can imagine,” he said. His eyes flicked over Doyoung’s form. “You’ve lost some weight.”

“I want more,” he told Johnny, his voice growing stronger.

“No,” Johnny said, flat and uncompromising.

“Please—”

“No. If you have any more, you will be sick.” Johnny’s tone implied that by ‘sick’, he meant dead, and there was not going to be any arguing. Doyoung, though he could have screamed, got the idea, and went quiet, sipping his tea.

After taking away the dishes, Johnny sat down on the edge of the bed, perilously close to Doyoung’s injured leg. For a strange, wild moment, Doyoung was convinced that if he nudged it, it would shatter, from the thigh onward, into a thousand pieces. “We need to have a little talk,” he said, and there was a quiet viciousness in his voice. “About Dr. Hyungsik.”

An irrational bloom of anger flared in Doyoung’s chest, more related to the denied food than anything to do with Hyungsik. “Why didn’t you come for me?” he demanded, his voice ragged.

“Because I couldn’t find you,” Johnny snapped, and that old madness was in his eyes again. “You know that.”

Doyoung said nothing.

Johnny smiled darkly. “When you vanished, I knew it wasn’t your doing,” he said quietly. “If you had that trick, you would have used it long ago. And besides, one of Enemessar’s most loyal priests was well known for his abilities— Bjarnmothr.”

“Hyungsik.” Doyoung unstuck his throat. “He was the family doctor— but I’d never seen him before, in any life—”

“Even if you had, it wouldn’t have mattered. He has ways of making his face unrecognizable even without changing his appearance. Your friend, Hyunjin… she never knew who he was, did she? And I can assure you, she and Bjarnmothr are very well-acquainted.”

Doyoung shifted. It had suddenly occurred to him that while he might be warm and relieved to be returned home, it was unlikely that Johnny had alerted Hyunjin or the Hwang as to his safe return.

“My phone,” he started, before he remembered what had become of his phone; he had had it on his person when Hyungsik had grabbed him and stuffed him into a trunk. He had woken to find it, and his bag and all worldly possessions therein gone. “Can I borrow your phone?”

“What for?”

“The Hwangs. And Hyunjin. I’m guessing you didn’t call any of them to let them know that I… that I’m still alive,” Doyoung asserted, and Johnny didn’t dispute it. “What day is it, anyway?”

“The sixteenth of December,” Johnny said, and handed Doyoung the phone.

He called the Hwangs first. It was an unpleasant conversation; he hadn’t the first idea of how to answer any of their questions, and so simply told them that he couldn’t tell them where he had been for weeks. He suspected that his exhausted, slurring insistence that he was fine did little to reassure them, other than the reassurance that he was not yet dead.

Hyunjin, however, was another story. “It was Hyungsik— Dr. Hyungsik,” he told her before she had even completed the question. “He’s Bjarnmothr and he killed Park Byungho and he— he— he— he wanted me for a— a sac- sacrifice…”

“Are you okay?” Hyunjin breathed, and then, “Where are you?”

“Home,” Doyoung said.

“I’m coming for you,” she announced immediately.

“No. Johnny’s here. And. And there’s a storm,” Doyoung said, with the barest glance towards the window. The wind was screaming badly enough that he was surprised that Johnny’s phone still got reception— less surprised when he remembered that it was Johnny’s phone, and the devil was unlikely be hindered by such mundane things as poor service.

“What did he do?” Hyunjin demanded, her voice shaking. “Did he— did he starve you, like they used to do? Did he kill you and then resuscitate you?”

“And there was a rabbit…” Doyoung said hoarsely.

“I would like my phone back,” Johnny said pointedly, holding out one hand.

“I barely talked to her!” Doyoung hissed. Johnny just raised his eyebrows. When he gave it back, Doyoung asked, “Is Hyungsik going to go after her?”

“Of course not.” Johnny was unimpressed. “No one wants to find out what Enemsessar would do to anyone who hurt Hyunjin— least of all, Bjarnmothr, I expect. You, though…” He paused. “He’ll want you back.”

Doyoung didn’t reply. When his hand had been at his ear, he had discovered his lymph nodes, both of them behind his ears, swollen to the size of a robin’s eggs, and as hard as eggshells under his skin. They didn’t hurt, much, but they were likely to start given that he didn’t think he could resist molesting them.

“What happened?” he asked quietly. “How did Jaehyun find me?”

Johnny, who had placed his phone on Doyoung’s bedside table, next to a green wax candle carved to look like a Christmas tree, settled into his chair. Doyoung was reminded forcibly of a bedside vigil for the dying, made all the more peculiar given that it was Johnny’s vigil for him. “He had that spell over you… the one that kept me from knowing your physical location.” He paused and didn’t quite manage to hide a sour face, at remembering the inability to locate his own servant. Ordinarily, Doyoung knew, Johnny knew the location of every minion in his service, as long as they were alive. “Victoria thought of a way of getting around it. More accurately, Victoria thought of someone who could get around it.”

“Who?” Doyoung asked blankly.

While he understood, in a hazy sort of way, that magic had types, Doyoung generally thought of magic as might; Youngho and Johnny were as powerful as one could be, second only to someone or something like Enemessar. He knew there must be more to it— otherwise En would have killed both Youngho and Johnny long ago— but it seemed like a decent general rule of thumb that if Johnny couldn’t do it, it couldn’t be done.

“Caecilia,” Johnny said simply.

“Because she’s a seer,” Doyoung realized aloud, wondering, not for the first time, if he could have broken through Hyungsik’s spell if he had known what he was doing. But there were other, more pressing questions. “But… how? You… and she… and I…”

“Well, we had to find her, first. At the time, I had the lot of them physically searching the countryside, and the mountains, for discrepancies and aberrations, anything that looked like a place Bjarnmothr could hide you away. Meanwhile, Victoria came up with her idea, and before she even ran it past me, she tracked down Caecilia.” He smiled, briefly. “Living on a mountain island in the Caribbean, apparently, in seclusion.” Johnny paused. “I should mention that while we were looking for you, the town of Damyang underwent something of a plague of nightmares; usually, nightmares concerning a bear, and the starvation of winter. You were trying to break free of Bjarnmothr, weren’t you?”

Doyoung nodded, remember Hyungsik’s flippant comment; they can hear you screaming all through town…

Johnny continued. “Victoria contacted Caecilia, and explained the situation, perhaps with some slight embellishment about what we thought Bjarnmothr might be doing to you. She arrived at Incheon Airport some eighteen hours later, and then went to work, hunting you down.”

Something stirred in Doyoung’s memory— an alien, feminine touch, just before Hyungsik had come down the stairs in a rushed fury. “Oh,” he whispered. “And then—”

“She broke through, and she gave us your coordinates, exactly,” Johnny continued grimly. “Bjarnmothr immediately knew what she had done, which complicated things somewhat, especially when he doubled down on the spell. But we had some good luck— Jaehyun wasn’t so far away at the time. He managed to get to the cabin in the woods, and from there, he simply followed the newest tire tracks in the snow, until he came to a place where they had pulled over for a time, and then followed the footsteps in the snow. If it wasn’t for that storm burying the woods in snow,” Johnny added. “Chances are, you’d still be in that cave.”

Chances were, Doyoung thought, he’d be dead— Hyungsik had left him in that cave out of desperation, not any sort of forethought, and Doyoung doubted he would have lived through the wait for the man to return.

“But I don’t understand,” he said, a bit weakly. “Why… why Caecilia agreed to help you. To get back at Youngho?”

“No,” Johnny said quietly. “And she didn’t agree to help me— she agreed to help in spite of me. She agreed to help you.”

“But I—” Doyoung pressed his lips together. “I ruined her relationship. Her life. She gave up her damn eyes for Youngho, and then I ruined that…”

Johnny regarded him, and seemed to be considering just what to say. Outside, the wind was screaming as badly as ever. “Why do you think I was so confident that you would seduce my brother— and yet never thought for a second that you would actually take him away from Caecilia?” he asked. Doyoung said nothing. “You weren’t my brother’s first fling, darling. Caecilia’s suffered through many more than just you.” He smiled, a bit sourly. “He’s a complicated man, my twin. She could have forgiven him for fucking you, I’m sure. She could have forgiven his falling in love. Their relationship seems to be cyclical— one or the other’s always out of love at some point, but given enough time, they both fall back in love.” He paused. “Until…”

“Until I jumped out of a window,” Doyoung whispered.

“It’s one thing to have an unfaithful lover. Another thing entirely to have a lover who drives a boy to suicide.” He settled back in his chair, his hands interwoven behind his head and smiled lazily at Doyoung. “The burden of the Sight, I am told, is that there is neither refuge nor comfort in the lies we all tell. While Youngho might have told himself that I was the major factor in your sudden inclination towards suicide, Caecilia had no such illusion. And while he might have told her that he slept with you, consensually, she knew better than he ever would what was going through your head during the act. And that, my dear, is how you broke up my brother and his lover.”

Quite a number of things were going through Doyoung’s mind, all at once, and none of them easy to sort out. He found visions pulling at him, at the back of his mind, like sleepiness, but he couldn’t give in to them. Not now.

“She pitied me,” he realized.

“She pitied you,” Johnny said slowly, nodding. “And she felt guilt. If she had been in Scotland… well, I never would have sent you, and if I had, she would have known you for what you were immediately. You would never have been subjected to Youngho, either way. But she wasn’t in Scotland, and you died. Her absence caused your death, once— and now, her presence has saved your life. I think she believes some sort of debt to have been paid.”

Doyoung realized, somewhat distantly, that Johnny was quite proud of himself for being able to discern the thoughts, feelings, and patterns of logic of Caecilia, someone who, in all likelihood, thought about the world entirely different than he himself.

“Back at Geurimaldi’s,” Doyoung started steadily.

“What?” Johnny said, not following.

“Back at Geurimaldi’s. In the Pioneer Suite.” Doyoung picked up Johnny’s phone, and then flung it into his face with all his might. It wasn’t much might, and Johnny, while surprised, managed to catch it before it hit him. “You fucker, you knew. You accused me of betraying you, and of screwing your brother, and you knew it was a rape. You knew, you fucking knew.”

“Of course I fucking knew,” Johnny snapped.

“So, what, you didn’t care about the difference?” Doyoung said, his voice rising ominously, in volume and, unfortunately, in pitch. “It’s all the goddamned same to you, whether or not there’s a choice?”

“I don’t care about whether or not you fuck my brother,” Johnny snapped, and then stopped. “Let me rephrase. I care— and while I find your lack of disobedience in that particular instance heartening, darling— the fact remains that whoever fucks you, consensually or not, all rather pales in comparison to the fact that you fucking killed yourself immediately afterwards!”

“I wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t—”

“What— that was not the only way to react!”

“It was sort of a heat of the moment decision,” Doyoung admitted.

Johnny was, for the moment, at a loss for words. He shook his head and turned away.

“Was Caecilia who Victoria was talking about, to you, just before she left?” Doyoung asked, interested.

Johnny nodded. “I’d asked her to stay to help me hunt down Bjarnmothr,” he said. “But apparently hunting him falls too much into the category of helping me and too little into the category of saving you.”

So she was still in town. As was Youngho. Doyoung stirred, ruminating on the idea.

Johnny fixed Doyoung in a gaze like a basilisk, and asked, in a deathly quiet voice, “Just what happened between you and Hyungsik, Doyoung?”

“He wanted me for a sacrifice,” Doyoung said slowly. “He said— he said he was going to feed me to En…”

Johnny’s eyebrows lifted, momentarily, and the storm screamed. “Sure,” he said. “And why give you the Sight?”

“Because I wouldn’t believe him,” Doyoung said. “He said that you… he was getting back at you… and…”

“Getting back at me for what?” Johnny sounded extraordinarily patient, for Johnny, and Doyoung suspected that that patience would likely be gone soon.

Doyoung looked at him, and it occurred to him that, more likely than not, the entire truth was going to come out, all of it, up to and including the pieces that Doyoung had been hiding from Johnny for centuries.

“Emin,” he said quietly. “Do you remember Emin? The boy in the temple… you killed him…”

It took Johnny a long moment to recall. “That?” he said. He laughed. “And to think— still paying for what I did when I was angelic…”

“You haven’t paid anything,” Doyoung said, his voice sharp despite its weakness, which amused Johnny all the more.

“So Hyungsik paid me back for murdering his little catamite a thousand years later by taking— you,” he began. There was an uncanny blazing in his eyes, focused on Doyoung, while Doyoung squirmed. “But he didn’t kill you.”

“The time wasn’t right, yet,” Doyoung whispered. “He was interrupted.”

Johnny studied him. “The time,” he repeated, and paused. “The timing of a sacrifice always mattered most to the obsessive, the ritualistic, and most of all the superstitious— the god himself usually doesn’t care much. Bjarnmothr was never obsessive-compulsive, or especially pious, and he’s well aware of just what is and what is not necessary to the act and rituals of sacrifice. Furthermore,” he added softly, “As I remember the old bastard, he could have had the main rituals done, and you broken and open and dead in record time, well before Jaehyun arrived. Instead, he left… and took the risk of someone finding you, or of you succumbing to your hypothermia. But he left you alive.”

“What are you saying?” Doyoung asked, his voice wavering.

Johnny shifted in his chair, and leaned back. “You, sweetheart,” he said. “Are a survivor. And yet, you’re not especially clever, or even intelligent; you’re not strong, you’re not lucky, and you are certainly not hearty. But it can’t be said that you don’t have a certain adaptability, a certain… submissiveness… that endears you to your captors.”

Doyoung swallowed hard. “I’ve died twice. How is that surviving?”

That got a laugh out of Johnny. “You survived Hyungsik,” he pointed out. “You survived Youngho, more or less, you survived Yura, and you survived that idiot Jaehyun murdered. You’ve survived me— so far.”

“I didn’t—” Doyoung stopped, and recovered himself. “He tortured me. He starved me, he— he—”

“He put you on a drip and made sure you survived,” Johnny concluded. “And he must not have let you succumb completely to hypothermia.”

“He wasn’t endeared by me.” Doyoung took another breath. “He wasn’t. And you aren’t either, and neither was Youngho— not in the end.”

Johnny paused at that, studying him. It occurred to Doyoung that he had spent so many years being careful of his every word with Johnny out of fear that Johnny would kill him in a rage, or even just the realization of his uselessness; his time with Youngho had been even worse, when he had to put on a front to earn Youngho’s affection, and the past few weeks with Hyungsik was the most terrorizing experience by far.

Now he knew; not only was Johnny not going to kill him, Johnny was, in his own twisted sort of way, in love. Doyoung knew that he was going to speak his mind, for better or worse; he didn’t think he could stop himself.

“You should have stopped me from leaving,” he hissed.

“What?” Johnny said blankly.

“Back in 1911,” Doyoung said. “You shouldn’t have let me go back to Youngho, and you shouldn’t have let— him— do what he did— and— and— and— you should have been there. And— and— you should have been there when Hyungsik took me. You— you— should have found me sooner.”

He was aware, even as he said it, that it wasn’t precisely the fairest accusation he’d ever made; but Johnny had made no shortage of unfair accusations against him, and there was some childish, furious part of him that insisted it was all truue.

He looked up just in time to see a blazing, triumphant look in Johnny’s eyes. His heart sank.

“What did you See in those visions, darling?” he asked softly.

“A lot of things,” Doyoung said quietly. He was sure, at just that moment, that Johnny would make him tell. But Johnny said nothing at all, as they lapsed into silence.

Doyoung broke it. “Can I have something else to eat? It’s been long enough.”

“It’s been barely fifteen minutes,” Johnny said, somewhere between incredulous and amused.

There was a sick, resentful feeling in Doyoung’s chest. “It’s my food, and my kitchen,” he announced, already ready push back the blankets to get the food himself.

“So it is,” Johnny said. “But you belong to me, by the deal that you made yourself, so how does that add up?” He paused. “Doyoung,” he started, suddenly serious again. “If I ordered you to forget everything Bjarnmothr did to you, and that entire experience, you would. Do you want me to?”

Doyoung went still. It had never occurred to him that Johnny’s power over him could work its way into his head like that; Johnny had never even hinted at it before. “No.” He hesitated, but he couldn’t keep quiet. “You could have done that at any time,” Doyoung blurted out, bewildered. “You could’ve— you could’ve made me think, feel— anything that you wanted—” Johnny’s eyes narrowed. “Why— why didn’t you?”

“I could have made you feel what?” Johnny asked dangerously.

Doyoung considered answering that question, and then reconsidered it. He shivered, and shook his head. “Never mind.”

Johnny’s phone (still in his hand, after Doyoung had flung it at him) rang. He got to his feet, answering even as he stepped out of Doyoung’s bedroom and into the kitchen, closing the door behind him.

Doyoung decided to take advantage of his newfound solitude. Gingerly, he peeled back the covers and dragged himself up onto his feet, using the wheeled I.V. stand for balance. Moving carefully, and with no small amount of difficulty, he limped his way over to his bookshelf, dragging the I.V. stand with him. There, he paused long enough to consider his collection, but only for a minute before the cold of the room and the wooziness began to affect him. He grabbed a handful of Animorphs books, Diana Wynne Jones’s Witch Week, and Aenir and Above the Veil of Garth Nix’s Seventh Tower books before limping back to his bed.

***


	8. Chapter 8

Johnny shook him awake an hour or so later, to take the I.V. needle out of his hand. “Such… refined… reading tastes you have, Doyoung,” he commented as he collected the books that had ended up haphazardly strewn about.

Doyoung ignored that, sitting up as best he could and rubbing at his eyes. He had dreamed again, and the vision was bright and vicious in his mind. It was of that boy, the one he had seen in the cathedral of viscera, the one Hyungsik had loved.

In his dream, Emin acted as the acolyte in the temple in the dead of the night, lighting the candles at the appropriate times, refilling the oil at the lamps, checking in on the doves to see whether or not the eggs were hatching just yet. He returned to the main room, and there, he found an angel, red, and the angel had opened the chest beneath the altar. He had pulled out the relic there, and he held it in his hands. Doyoung only barely caught a glimpse, of an ancient dress stiff and ruined with blood.

Emin screamed, and rushed at him, and the angel swung the lantern round and hit him in the head.

There was darkness.

In waking, Doyoung knew the face of the angel’s as Johnny’s, but he pushed the thought aside. “Can I have something to eat?” he asked.

“Nope. But I’ll tell you what: you can have some antibiotics—” Johnny indicated the pill bottle by the bedside table; Doyoung wondered where it had come from. “And then you can go back to sleep.”

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Doyoung said, pushing back the blankets with some difficulty.

Johnny helped him limp, and would have carried him, if Doyoung hadn’t been ready to pitch a fit over the idea. “Who called you?” he asked blearily, as Johnny supported him.

“Meihui,” Johnny answered.

“About Hyungsik?”

“As it happens, no. It was an update as to who is in town to witness the awakening.” Johnny paused. 

Doyoung grimaced, but didn’t ask any more questions.

Once in the bathroom, he noticed the tissue paper and glitter stars that had been taped onto the window (he had made them in the second grade, and his mother had kept them), and the snow caked up outside, blurring out any hint of the outside world. He brushed his teeth and realized that at some point when he was unconscious, Johnny, Victoria, or some imp Johnny had summoned up (and he misliked all of these options) had scrubbed him clean of his time in Hyungsik’s hands. His hair was noticeably longer, if also thinner and duller, but perfectly clean.

On the way back, just before depositing him in the bed, Johnny pressed a hand to Doyoung’s forehead.

“Your temperature isn’t nearly as recovered as I would have hoped,” he commented.

Doyoung didn’t care. He took the pills that Johnny gave him, and drank the water, before curling up on his side. He only vaguely noticed Johnny dimming the lights, and he found himself listening more closely to the storm outside than to the sound of Johnny pulling off his shirt.

He felt the blankets lift, and Johnny climbed into bed beside him.

Doyoung’s heartbeat was suddenly pounding in his temples again. “What are you doing?” he squeaked.

“What do you think?” Johnny muttered. “For once, in any life, would you just be quiet and cooperative?”

That was easier said than done, Doyoung thought, when Johnny’s arms closed around him and pulled him close, his head tucked under the man’s chin. He was brutally aware of being naked, and of how close Johnny was to the wound in his thigh.

He was also aware of the fantasies he had seen in Johnny’s head, and squirming at the thoughts contained therein.

Nonetheless, he was warm for the first time in so long, and comfortable, and while he might not have felt safe, exactly, this was very nearly a heaven when compared to Hyungsik. Johnny was kind enough to lie still, and therefore be non -threatening, or at least less threatening than he could have been. Doyoung had very nearly dozed off when the thought occurred to him, lazily, that he could get inside Johnny’s head, and he badly wanted to know what the man was thinking.

He didn’t take the time to examine his own judgment. Tentatively, he touched Johnny’s arm, just as he had in the visions, to let himself into the man’s mind.

Johnny’s fingers closed around his wrist.

“Hyungsik should have mentioned,” Johnny said in a slow, cold voice. “That rifling through the minds of angels and devils isn’t a good idea. Getting inside my mind opens yours to me.”

Doyoung thrashed, but discovered he couldn’t move. He felt it, somehow, through the panic that was overwhelming him. He was in Johnny’s mind, but he couldn’t get out, couldn’t pull back, couldn’t shut off, and Johnny, in a horrible feeling that reminded Doyoung forcibly of the slithering of a snake, was slipping into his mind and everything he was, every thought and wish and memory he had.

He tried to wrench his hand out of Johnny’s grasp, tried to squirm away, but Johnny’s fingers tightened, even as his arms pulled Doyoung closer. The invasive slithering changed as Johnny’s mind ripped through him and into him. The vision before Doyoung’s eyes went black.

This was much more intimate than the intrusion of any vision, much louder and closer and altogether far worse. He felt the desires and the fantasies first, felt amusement and satisfaction in Johnny like the cat who got the cream. The idea of fucking Doyoung was still at the front of his mind, and foremost was the desire for the domination of the act— the desire to shove Doyoung down on his knees, on the floor, and ride him brutally until Doyoung cried out—

Under that fantasy (and several more besides), there was a remembered fear, as sharp as broken glass, of the weeks when Johnny had been unsure if he would find Doyoung in time, the fear that he would lose the boy for good. The memory was accompanied by the careful observation of Doyoung, a devoted study that Johnny had compiled for years, a catalogue of details and appearance that had remained uncomfortably close to Johnny’s mind even in the hundreds of years when Doyoung was dead with no sign of reincarnation. During the chess game, he had watched Doyoung’s eyes move over the chessboard, confused and trying to strategize in spite of himself, watched the eyelashes flutter and the eyes slowly give up in fatigue at the puzzle presented before him. He watched the way Doyoung mouthed the first word of a sentence he was about to say, as if that might overcome the stammer that sometimes paralyzed him, and he stared at that mouth, those lips, that narrow chin and pronounced cheekbones, and thought about how lovely that mouth would look around his cock. Thought about how his throat and tongue would work, eyes searching up for Johnny’s approval, desperate as Doyoung was to please…

And somehow, there, Doyoung found it: a deep affection for Doyoung that gave way to something dark and obsessive and consuming, something that could only be love. He found the remembered and horrible fear at Doyoung’s disappearance, the knowledge that when he was sacrificed to Enemessar, he would be gone forever, and the desperation that ensued…

With an enormous effort, he managed to break free of delving into Johnny’s mind, only to catch what Johnny was doing in his own.

The devil was lingering over his own memories, his own wishes and desires. He was back in the cabin, with Hyungsik, flat on his stomach, an arm littered with cigarette burns outstretched, limp, as Hyungsik rutted into him. Johnny’s observation was cold, on the surface; Johnny had already assumed that this had happened, and was, if anything, surprised to find that it had happened only once.

Underneath that dispassionate observation, there was a rage in him, something boiling and harrowing in its building anger, but before Doyoung could see any more, the memory had changed.

Doyoung was on his knees, on that dusty bed, for Youngho, bruises from recent blows aching enough to threaten broken bones. He was still, desperately and furiously, trying to fight, trying to kick and elbow Youngho in the face— but the angel had him pinned down, and even after the preparation, even after being held in position, the penetration still came as such a shock that it took his breath away —

He was thirteen, sullen, and naked. He was on his knees for Kibum (and why, Doyoung wondered, humiliated and unhappy, did we have to remember Kibum?) who had that hated whip in one hand, and his cock in the other, and was explaining to Doyoung just what he was going to do, and just what was going to happen should he misbehave.

Johnny analyzed it all, and far more, while Doyoung tried to retreat into himself, tried to pull his mind and his awareness back from a brutal waltz through an ugly past; but once opened to Johnny, there was no closing him out, and there was no escape.

Before very long at all, Johnny had been found something far more interesting to him than any past brutality inflicted by his twin or anyone else. He found the memory, and the thoughts therein, of that day in Scotland when he gave Doyoung the order to seduce Youngho, when Doyoung stared at his back, sick in love and pining, desperately, fruitlessly, helplessly, to be loved back.

Doyoung, in the present, squirmed like a hooked fish, and was only half aware of how his squirming translated into the physical, in desperate attempts to struggle free of Johnny, who just held him all the more tightly. He felt, even then, Johnny’s interest piqued like nothing yet, felt Johnny rummaging through his head for more.

With that one memory to guide him, Johnny dug up a thousand more, until he was able to trace this infatuation of Doyoung’s to its very tentative beginnings in his first life, and through to the third when it became a secret told to Hyunjin and manifested as a frustration Doyoung held with himself, an inability to fall out of love. He saw how, to his horror, that infatuation had started up again in unrelenting potency when he had laid eyes on Johnny again— the memory followed through to the moment Johnny struck Doyoung, and the black eye—

Johnny released Doyoung.

Doyoung sent one last, instinctive kick his way, and immediately regretted it when his foot connected and pain shot through his bones, concentrated in his wound. Johnny pulled back, and sat up.

Even sitting, he took up most of the bed, leaving Doyoung curled up on one side, as far away from Johnny as he could get and therefore pressed up against the wall. Johnny was horribly silent for the longest time.

“Well,” he said, finally. “That wasn’t exactly what I was expecting to find.” Doyoung grabbed the pillow and pressed it over his head. “Fuck you,” he breathed.

Johnny started laughing. To Doyoung’s horror and disgust, he kept laughing. He climbed out of bed and went into the kitchen, all the while still laughing.

He was in a very good mood when he returned, while Doyoung stayed curled up where he was, a pillow still pressed over his head. He reached under the blankets and found Doyoung’s good leg, and, taking ahold of his ankle, yanked him closer.

Doyoung twisted around and kicked at him, unwisely. “You— you fucking dick!” he shouted. “You — invasive, evil, fucking—”

“You already knew all of that when you sold yourself to me,” Johnny said, unimpressed. “And what was that— invasive? That’s the pot calling the kettle black. Who started this?”

“It’s different when I do it,” Doyoung said furiously.

Johnny laughed out loud. “How is that so?”

“Because I’m afraid of you!” Doyoung took a great breath. “You— you— you— want to know what’s in my head, but I need to know what’s in yours because— cause—”

“Because I’m going to hurt you,” Johnny finished, his mad eyes gleaming.

“Yes.” He paused. “You know, I never gave you anywhere near enough credit. I would never have thought you could hide a secret like this from me for so many years.”

Doyoung glared.

Johnny grinned. “Look at it this way, darling— we’re even now. I know what’s in your head— and you know what’s in mine.” Doyoung flushed at the reminder, and Johnny’s grin widened.

“We’re even?” he repeated in a small voice.

“Mm. Much as I would like to continue this conversation…” Johnny started. His smile was suddenly gone, and he was looking over Doyoung with a certain concern that Doyoung didn’t think he’d ever seen before. “You need to calm down. You can’t have this sort of strain on your heart, after what Hyungsik did to your body.”

Doyoung scowled, but he felt sick to his stomach, exhausted, hard of breath, and his heart was going unbelievably fast. He swallowed hard and sat back against the pillows, as the world spun around him.

Johnny sat on the edge of the bed, his hand moving towards Doyoung. He paused momentarily when Doyoung flinched, and then ran his fingers through Doyoung’s hair.

“So that’s why he gave you the Sight,” he murmured. He seemed to find some own private humor in the matter. “He must be all the more pissed that you survived.”

“What?” Doyoung squeaked.

Johnny smiled apologetically. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart,” he said, and he leaned down to kiss Doyoung.

It wasn’t like when Hyungsik kissed him. Johnny slid a hand around the back of his head to keep him from jerking back, and an arm around his torso to pull him close. He was careful, gentle, and patient, at least at first. Doyoung, despite all his hesitance, kissed him back. He opened his mouth and let Johnny’s tongue in, and he let Johnny support his weight, for all the fear he still held.

He had, after all, been in love for a long time, and for all that he knew better, he wasn’t sure how much he cared anymore.

By the time Johnny laid him flat, he was so tired his head was buzzing. He fell into sleep almost immediately, despite the hints of demons and monsters that played around his vision, threatening worse nightmares and visions.

**

Doyoung dreamed that he stood in the kitchen on a sunny morning. Not his own kitchen, but a kitchen that was somehow familiar nonetheless. He was brewing coffee (which he did not drink, and never had) and when the coffeepot declared it done, he poured it, black, into a mug, and turned. He walked across a carpet of broken glass that shredded his feet, to put it down before a man whose face was obscured by the newspaper he read. His hands were big.

“Thanks, dear,” the man said, voice low and amused and, in the dream, both very close and very far away. Doyoung stood before him, on the glass shard carpet, bleeding. He realized he was naked.

He woke.

He was tucked into bed, so tightly wrapped in woolen blankets that he could barely move. Outside, the storm had calmed, but not completely abated; the wind still groaned and banged at the windows, and there was too much ice and snow caked on the glass to even guess the time of day.

A number of thoughts went through Doyoung’s head. While the first and most horrifying was that Johnny now knew— something he’d been desperately trying to keep hidden for years— the most pressing matter was the hunger in the pit of his stomach. He clawed his way free of the blankets and managed to gingerly get to his feet. Limping severely, but too weak to hop, he managed to get himself to the dresser, accidentally knocking one of the red velvet stockings to the ground in the process. He clothed himself in flannel pajama bottoms, a t-shirt, and two pairs of woolen socks. After pulling an old knit sweater over his head, he shuffled, with some difficulty, into the kitchen, silently grateful that his loft was as tiny and cramped as it was.

Just as the firewood had been stacked, the sheets and blankets cleaned, and the Christmas decorations taken out of storage, the kitchen had been changed. Everything looked to have been scrubbed clean, from walls to the tiled floor to each ancient appliance. The mousetraps had been swept away. There were baskets full of fruit on the counter, cabinets full of canned and dried food, a loaf of bread in the breadbox, potatoes and Doyoungs in their respective baskets, and a refrigerator full to bursting of milk, eggs, cheese, yogurt, and all sorts of berries and vegetables.

Just as in Doyoung’s bedroom, the Christmas decorations had been brought out. Crystal snowflake ornaments hung from the ceiling, and the walls had been hung with Christmas lights and gold tinsel, and gleaming red and green letters reading HAPPY HOLIDAYS!, once stolen from Doyoung’s mother’s office, had been posted up in the window.

Doyoung gazed about. He doubted Johnny had done any of this himself (it all had the tell-tale signs of a summoned imp), but he appreciated the results.

Johnny stood over the stove, where he looked simply too massive to be allowed. Doyoung wondered if he were to straighten up if the top of his head would touch the ceiling. He turned back to Doyoung and frowned. “Sit down,” he ordered.

“What did you make?” Doyoung asked, refusing to be distracted.

“Pho.” Johnny took Doyoung’s shoulder one-handed and pushed him into the chair. It was not difficult.

Doyoung looked up expectantly, and Johnny put down a bowl of pho, thick with chicken, bean sprouts, basil leaves, and rice noodles, in front of him.

It was an abysmally small portion, and Doyoung was too busy scowling to notice that Johnny had crouched down beside him until Johnny grabbed a fistful of his hair and turned his head forcibly, kissing him hard.

Doyoung squealed a bit, but relaxed after a moment, opening his mouth. When Johnny let him go, he turned back to the food.

He ate it quickly, and even the small amount was like lead in his stomach, as filling as he could ever want. Afterwards, Johnny gave him two pills, an antibiotic and a painkiller, swallowed down with water.

Within the hour, he had brushed his teeth and returned to bed. He was still exhausted. By then, the storm was beginning to die down. He woke up maybe an hour later, after chaotic, unsettling dreams of dismembered limbs frozen bloody in the snow, when he felt an arm wrap around him, pulling him up. He was still somewhat incoherent when he realized he was naked, and Johnny had curled around him, nuzzling his shoulder, neck, and ear, while his hands stroked Doyoung’s belly and thighs and closer…

Doyoung squirmed, and Johnny let out a low laugh when his hand closed around Doyoung’s cock. He was gentle, if unrelenting, when he began to stroke him.

Doyoung would have thought he was too exhausted, but he found himself wide awake. It had been quite some time since he had come, and it wasn’t long before Johnny had him squirming and gasping and trying very hard to maintain some semblance of dignity. Eventually, there was nothing for it; he threw his head back into Johnny’s shoulder and came.

Afterwards, exhaustion swept over him, until it was nearly impossible to keep himself awake. Johnny rolled him onto his back, and would have slipped away, except that Doyoung grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

“Are you sure about this?” Johnny asked, very quietly. Doyoung nodded, and that was all the prompting Johnny needed. He pushed his legs open and knelt between them. He was careful, gentle, and patient, as he coaxed Doyoung’s injured leg up onto his hips, and he leaned down to kiss Doyoung while his hands stroked and explored.

Doyoung’s hands went up to Johnny’s shoulders. “Now,” he mumbled.

He felt Johnny’s smile when he kissed him. “Now…?”

He woke with a yelp when Johnny pushed into him, hot and bruising at the center of him. He tightened his arms around Johnny’s neck and whimpered. Johnny laughed softly, rocking Doyoung into the bed. It hurt; it was a distant, stretching and burning pain, but it hurt.

“I want…” he mumbled, trying to remember.

“I promised myself, sweetheart,” Johnny murmured into his ear. “That if I ever got you back… alive… I would do this. That I wouldn’t deny myself anymore.”

Doyoung’s breath hitched as Johnny pressed deeper into him.

He couldn’t quite stay awake, but he woke again, briefly, when Johnny’s thrusts grew fast and brutal.

Afterwards, Johnny held him cuddled close, and Doyoung fell into near unconsciousness.

There were no vicious dreams, this time. He dreamed of Johnny, or Johnny’s mind; Johnny’s glory at fucking him, the physical delight of the heat, the tightness, the closeness…

**

Doyoung woke, thinking of Youngho.

He dragged himself out of bed, limping. Johnny was gone from the loft; Doyoung imagined that he had had more than enough of being cooped up in the small rooms, and didn’t think much more of it. He peeked out of the windows to find the weather outside quiet, the sky gray above, but without a hint of any new storm. It was hard to tell from this height, but it looked as though the snow on the ground might be as much as waist deep, and perfectly unbroken, untouched, by footprints, shovel, or snowplow.

Youngho remained on his mind even as he climbed into the shower. He was shivering in spite of the warm water, as a stray comment of Johnny’s echoed through his head; “The burden of the Sight, I am told, is that there is neither refuge nor comfort in the lies we all tell.” He felt himself growing woozy, and carefully crouched down until he was sitting on the floor of the bathtub, still under the shower’s spray.

A vision shuddered through him. He saw Youngho, alone in the woods, and the angel was searching— for Hyungsik, Doyoung was sure, for all that he would never find him. Youngho’s head went up sharply, his eyes narrowed, suddenly aware of someone watching him. Doyoung, with a force he himself didn’t understand, dragged himself away.

It occurred to him to wonder, in an errant thought, where Hyungsik might be. There was no vision accompanying the thought, no sudden glimpse of the mad priest— Hyungsik was far too skilled at his craft for Doyoung to intercede on knowledge Hyungsik didn’t want him to have— but there was the sudden, painfully acute knowledge that the man was coming for him.

He gasped when the shower curtain was suddenly thrown open, and looked up to find himself staring up at Johnny. Johnny considered him for a long moment. “Are you down there by choice?” he asked mildly.

With difficulty, Doyoung managed to get up onto his feet. “Hyungsik,” he said, his mouth dry.

“What?” Johnny’s eyebrows went up.

“Hyungsik’s coming.” Doyoung’s voice was hoarse.

“Of course he is.” Johnny’s gaze went up and down Doyoung’s body. “You didn’t think that he’d just let you go, did you?”

Doyoung leaned against the wall to keep from falling down and scowled. He did not like the cavalier attitude.

“You had a vision?” Johnny added, already pulling his shirt over his head.

“Yes…” He scowled all the more when Johnny finished stripping and stepped into the shower with him.

“Stop worrying,” Johnny murmured, collecting him close. “If Bjarnmothr could kill me, he would have done it a long time ago.”

“What about me?” Doyoung demanded.

“I’m here.”

Doyoung was not reassured. “Where did you go?”

“I went to get firewood,” Johnny said, picking him up and pulling his legs open in one movement, even as he kissed Doyoung’s neck and shoulder. “I wasn’t far, and I didn’t leave you alone, though I’m sure it looked that way.” Which meant a summoned imp, Doyoung was sure— it left him feeling particularly uneasy.

He wrapped his arms around Johnny’s neck. He couldn’t quite bring himself to trust Johnny not to drop him if he were to say something that irritated the man. “I—” He flinched as Johnny pushed into him. “I saw a vision of— of Youngho—”

“Can you not,” Johnny growled, thrusting harder and grabbing a handful of Doyoung’s flesh hard enough to bruise. “Talk about my brother when I’m fucking you?”

“He was looking for Hyungsik,” Doyoung gasped.

“Good,” Johnny snapped.

“Why? Why was he looking for Hyungsik? What does he care?”

Johnny pulled out of him and let him collapse to the floor of the bathtub. Doyoung had no sooner done so than Johnny crouched down, grabbing him and turning him onto his hands and knees, easily pushing his legs open with one hand. Doyoung tensed, drawing his injured leg closer to himself. Johnny thrust into him again and curled over him, one arm tight around Doyoung, the other hand mussing his wet hair. “You’re the one with the Sight, darling,” he murmured into Doyoung’s ear.

Visions were already pulling at Doyoung— glimpses of bloodied knights and of broken gravestones, a chill that bit into the heart of him despite the warmth Johnny provided— but he was getting better at not succumbing to them.

Afterwards, in the kitchen, Doyoung sat with his head lying on his folded arms, as Johnny made toast (on the stove, as Doyoung didn’t own a toaster) and tea. “Are the visions always going to be this bad?” he asked, not entirely coherently.

“No,” Johnny said steadily. “But they’re always going to be worse when you’re sick, injured, tired, or hungry— here.” He pushed a plate towards Doyoung, complete with buttered toast with jam.

Doyoung perked up and picked it up. “I want more,” he said automatically.

“See how much you can eat first,” Johnny said patiently.

He turned out to be right. One piece of toast, accompanied by a few sips of chamomile tea, left Doyoung feeling uncomfortably full. Johnny ate the rest of the toast, unsurprised by Doyoung’s mercurial appetite.

Doyoung fidgeted with the crust of bread while he waited, tapping it against the edge of his plate. He felt as though there were visions pulling at the edges of his eyes, as if he were to go still and concentrate, he’d be lost in a storm of bears and snakes and dead birds. Just when it occurred to him that he was trying Johnny’s patience with his fidgeting, he dropped the crust, and said, “I want to speak to Caecilia.”

Johnny considered him. “All right,” he said, pulling his phone out of his pocket. Doyoung eyed him, apprehensive, as he unlocked the phone and scrolled through contacts until he came to her name. It all looked so peculiarly modern. By the time Johnny handed the phone to Doyoung, it was already ringing.

Doyoung held it to his ear, his mouth dry. It occurred to him that it would look to her as if Johnny was calling her— and then, just as quickly, he realized that she should know otherwise immediately, given that she was a Seer, and much better at it than he was. Nonetheless, the call went to her voicemail. “Hi, you’ve reached Caecilia. I can’t take your call right now, but please leave your name and number and I will call you back just as soon as I have a moment. Thanks, and have a great day!”

“Atrociously chipper, isn’t she?” Johnny commented drolly, just before the tone blared. She sounded sweeter than Doyoung had imagined, friendlier, and kinder. His heart was beating very fast, and it took him an uncomfortably long moment to find his voice. “Hi, it’s— this is— it’s—” He swallowed. “Kim Dongyoung. Please call me back. I’d like to talk to you.” He hung up before he could humiliate himself any further.

Johnny gazed at him, toast in hand. “If you get after me for stammering—” Doyoung started to say threateningly, for all that he had no way to complete the threat.

“I was just thinking how strange it is to hear you refer to yourself by your name,” Johnny said, with a slow smile. “Kim Dongyounng. The stammer, on the other hand, is not unusual at all.”

Doyoung was a storm of irritation at that remark— he would’ve liked to stomp off, but there wasn’t anywhere farther away than fifteen feet to go, and his leg hurt too much to do any moving quickly. The idea had barely more than occurred to him when he reached out to grab Johnny’s arm and sent all of that irritation into his mind.

Johnny jerked his arm away, but he grinned. “Learned to bite, have you?”

“I always knew how to bite,” Doyoung snapped. 

Johnny laughed, even as he got to his feet. “You are going to be useful, now that you have the Sight,” he commented. “Come on. You look worn out.”

Back in bed, Johnny stripped the pajama pants off of Doyoung and flipped him onto his stomach. He stripped off the bandages, and his fingers traced over the wound. Doyoung made himself lie still only through sheer force of will. “What does it look like?” he asked, his voice wavering.

“Like it’s going to be a bad scar,” Johnny said. “But you’ll live.” He bandaged it again, and then turned Doyoung onto his back. He shoved his shirt up to his collar even as he knelt down to kiss the boy’s cock. Doyoung found it suddenly difficult to breathe. He felt weak. He felt as much at Johnny’s mercy as he had recently been at Hyungsik’s— but (and it was a strange thing to realize) he trusted Johnny, to a point. He was still recovering, still finding his way around his own head after everything Hyungsik had done, but he discovered that he liked this feeling. Johnny’s phone rang.

Doyoung bit back a groan, as Johnny sat up and checked it. “It’s her,” he said handing it to Doyoung.

Doyoung answered. “Hello?” He had no sooner spoken than Johnny went back to licking him. Doyoung shoved his head away.

“Dongyoung.” Her voice sounded like a breath of spring. “How are you feeling?”

"I’m fine. Now.”

“No. You’re not.” She sighed. “But you will be. You’ll get better. You wanted to talk to me, dear?”

Doyoung found that his heart was beating very fast. Now that he had her on the phone, he wanted to speak to her about everything and nothing. He couldn’t focus his mind. He heard himself speaking, out of instinct, before he knew what he was going to say. “I wanted to apologize.” His voice was barely more than a squeak. Johnny, who was in the midst of standing to walk into the kitchen, paused. “I am sorry, truly. I… What I did… I broke you and Youngho up, and I made a mess of everything, and I hurt you, but I never had anything against you, never even had a reason to have anything against you, and…”

“I know,” she said. “And I won’t pretend I wasn’t angry… but it was a long time ago, Dongyoung, and the fact of the matter was that you never had even as much choice as you thought you had. Besides…” she paused for a long time. “Youngho… even if you presented him with temptation, Youngho is still responsible for his own choices.”

“Yes,” Doyoung said, very quietly.

Johnny was sitting on the edge of the bed, listening silently. He met Doyoung’s eyes for only a moment. Doyoung was somewhat grateful that he hadn’t left; he knew Johnny’s hearing was good enough to hear the whole conversation, regardless of where he was in the apartment. There was no bothering with deception.

“I also wanted to thank you,” Doyoung said, his voice ragged. “I’d be dead, if it wasn’t for you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said gravely. “I wish I could have found you sooner. You must understand… the dead god’s mad priest, he has a thousand years on me, and then some, and he has powers by grace of birth, nothing paltry bargained for over a well… He’s far beyond my ken.”

“As much as you’re beyond mine.”

“Yes. I’m sorry for you, that you’ve been gifted with the Sight. Glad for you that you could keep your eyes.”

“It’s going to drive me mad, isn’t it?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But it will make you useful, and I’ve discovered that that can be just as bad. Again, I am sorry.”

Doyoung struggled to find something to say. He wanted to ask her if she still loved Youngho, but he suspected it would not have been in the best of taste, and his anxiety on the matter was somewhat compounded by the voice in the back of his head pointing out that there was a good chance that she already knew what he wanted to ask.

“You know what happens now, don’t you?” she asked. “You Saw it, after all.”

“No,” Doyoung said.

“Or you Saw it, and then denied it, even to yourself,” she continued. “Denial will always be both the greatest salve and the worst enemy of every Seer.”

“No—” Doyoung started again, but he was interrupted by a pounding on the door.

Johnny was on his feet and moving. “Goodbye, Doyoung,” Caecilia said gravely. “Give my regards to Johnny— but tell him not to push his luck— and I look forward to hearing from you again in the future.”

Doyoung heard Johnny open the door— which was immediately followed by an explosion of shouting. Johnny’s voice was clear enough, and it was accompanied by another—

Doyoung dropped the phone and dragged himself up. Dressed, more or less, he limped into the kitchen as quickly as he could. Caecilia had been right; he knew it wasn’t Hyungsik.

Youngho stood in the doorway. He looked about ready to murder his brother, who appeared to share similar sentiments. He went silent at the sight of Doyoung, and Johnny looked around, still furious.

Doyoung held the back of a chair for balance. It had been a little more than a hundred years since he had last laid eyes on Youngho.

Youngho broke the silence. “Dongyoung. You’re alive,” he said simply. “And well. Or, well enough to be on your feet.” He was looking Doyoung up and down. His face was too impassive for Doyoung to make the first guess at what he might be thinking.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Johnny hissed.

“He called me,” Youngho said, nodding to Doyoung.

Doyoung found his voice. “I didn’t call you,” he said. “I Saw you— and I was thinking of you, and thinking that I wanted to talk to you. But I didn’t call you.”

“Well. I’m here, all the same.” His eyes slid to his brother. “One of your minions is just outside,” he said coolly. “He tried to stop me from coming inside. He’s injured.”

Doyoung stepped forward, immediately regretting it when pain lanced through his leg. “Who is it?” he demanded.

“Does it matter?” Youngho asked.

Johnny’s eyes flashed. “Doyoung,” he said. “Be brave.” With that, he vanished, down the steps.

Youngho stepped inside, closing the door after himself. “You wanted to talk to me,” he said simply. “So talk.”

Doyoung eyed him. “Why did you come?”

Youngho smiled grimly. “I told you—”

“I wanted to talk to you— I didn’t want you to come here. And anyway, what I want has never mattered to you, in the past. So why now?” He realized he was shaking.

Youngho was silent for a long moment. “I wanted to know how you are. Alive or dying.” He looked grim. “Or, as appears to be the case, recovering from dying.”

Doyoung tried to take a step backwards— to get closer to the chair, to grip it for balance— but his legs gave out from under him and he collapsed. Youngho strode to him, and Doyoung scrambled back before the angel could touch him.

“No— listen,” he said, breathing hard. “I did want to talk to you. About what happened— about what you did.” Before Youngho could respond, he went on. “You raped me. And I know you thought — I know you think— that it was just, it was just rough, or something, and you thought I said no but I meant yes, or something. I know you thought that— that what I thought didn’t matter—” It hurt, he realized. It hurt to plead this case, to Youngho. He felt as though he was fighting a war for reality, as if Youngho could, with enough force, overrule him and make the past into something else; could make Doyoung, of the past, into something else.

“Dongyoung—” Youngho’s voice was hushed, and his face looked nearly pained. He moved closer, and, when Doyoung dragged himself forcibly backwards in reaction, paused. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to hurt you, and even if I did…” His face twisted into something almost like a smile. “My brother’s claimed this place, and you in it; there’s no easy way around old magic like that.”

“Good,” Doyoung said breathlessly.

“Listen to me. I regret… sleeping with you. It was poorly timed, and it was clear that you weren’t in the right frame of mind—”

“When did you work that out,” Doyoung spat. “Before or after I jumped out of the fucking window?”

Youngho paused, just long enough for Doyoung to begin to feel immature. “It was badly done,” he continued softly. “I wasn’t… kind to you. But to be fair…” His eyes flashed. “You had betrayed me.”

Doyoung swallowed. “What I did to you was horrible,” he said quietly. “I spied on you for months, and I did my best to gain your trust, for the single purpose of abusing that trust. And, Johnny told me I was supposed to make you infatuated with me, but I didn’t— I still don’t— know how to go about making someone be infatuated, so…” He shrugged. “But what you did— what you did is inexcusable. I didn’t sleep with you. You fucked me. You raped— that’s the fucking word for it, Youngho.”

“I didn’t intend—”

“I know you didn’t intend,” Doyoung hissed. “I know that you thought it was consensual. That’s what’s going to make me crazy, now that Hyungsik put this wretched power in my head— I know how little of a fuck you gave about what I thought, and it’s fucking galling.” He took a great breath. “What I don’t understand is how you could think that. I told you no, I told you. I screamed and fought you and fucking bit you, and you hit me, and— and— and what, you thought that was my kink, or something? You thought I wanted to be fucked into submission?” His voice broke on the words.

It took Youngho a long time to answer. “I’d seen the look on your face,” he said quietly. “Before that night. Weeks, and even months before. You wanted me. I knew that.”

“Yes, I did want you,” Doyoung said bitterly. “I wasn’t in love with you— not ever— but I did want you. You’re exactly my type— a bit of crazy, and an authority figure able and likely to obliterate me.” Like Kibum, a voice in the back of his head said. Like Johnny. He brushed it aside. “But I didn’t want you when you did it, and I didn’t want to have sex, and even if I had wanted to, I still didn’t consent to it.”

Youngho sat back on the floor, and regarded Doyoung. His face was dark. “I understand,” he said quietly. “But you must realize— you’re splitting hairs. That’s a distinction we make today— it wasn’t something we thought about back then.”

“You weren’t thinking about it,” Doyoung snapped. “But I killed myself because I thought that if I couldn’t have any control over my body, then no one was going to have control. And there’s nothing that proves you don’t have control quite like being raped.”

Youngho’s mouth twisted. “You know about Caecilia,” he said.

“That she left you?” Doyoung asked.

“That we argued— that she said my actions were the major factor of your suicide.”

“Did you think she was saying that just to spite you?”

Youngho looked away. “I thought she must be mistaken.” He closed his eyes, briefly. “I am sorry, Dongyoung.”

He wasn’t, Doyoung realized. He thought he was, and he might be someday, but he wasn’t truly sorry, and the Sight wouldn’t let Doyoung have the false comfort. “You’ll make it up to me,” Doyoung said raggedly, and Youngho stared at him, suddenly as keen and cruuel as he had ever been. It was one thing, he thought, to try to make Youngho understand his perspective— it was another thing to demand restitution. He was perilously close to Youngho throwing an accusation of whoring and lying at him. “Make peace with Johnny. Not today, obviously— you’ve just made him furious all over again— but in the future. In the next year. Strike up a truce.”

Youngho was silent for a moment. “That’s against our natures,” he said finally. “He’s one of the fallen.”

“Seeing as you’re an angel who’s raped,” Doyoung hissed. “You’ll understand if that’s not an argument that impresses me very much.” He hesitated. “And— call Caecilia. Please. You still love her, and I think she still loves you. But stop using her for her Sight.”  
Youngho turned back to him. There was a strange little smile playing on his face; he looked nothing like Johnny. “I did love you,” he said softly. “I’m sorry that I hurt you, but… that was what drove me.”

He still did, Doyoung knew. The Sight wouldn’t let him hide from that knowledge, either. “I know,” he said. “And I want you to go away now. Please go away.”

**

Johnny returned, some ten minutes after Youngho had left. “It was Mark, that he injured?” Doyoung asked, fidgeting. He would have liked to be pacing, but that wasn’t really an option.

“You’re getting the hang of your new powers,” Johnny said, without much note of congratulation in his voice.

“Will he be all right?”

“Mark? Yeah, he’ll be fine. He’s had worse, time and again.” Johnny scowled. “What did you talk about with my brother?”

A number of ways to answer that question came to Doyoung’s mind, almost all of them likely to inflame Johnny’s temper. “I told him I wanted him to strike up a truce with you.” At the look at Johnny’s face, he added, “And don’t you dare accuse me of what you did last time, of wanting to be his instead— you’ve seen inside my head. You know that it’s bullshit.”

“Why,” Johnny said bluntly. “Do you want my brother and myself to kiss and make up?”

“I want there to be less fighting,” Doyoung said.

“How noble.”

“Maybe.” Doyoung tried to get to his feet; Johnny caught him when he collapsed. “It’s getting worse,” he whined when Johnny carried him back to bed. “My leg. It’s worse.”

“You’re just tired,” Johnny said.

“You’re going to have to cut it off.”

“Believe me, you’d feel much better if this infection was enough of a good sport to be so localized.” He gave Doyoung the daily antibiotics and painkillers, with a glass of water to wash them down.

It had started snowing again outside, silently, without any of the éclat of the earlier storms. Doyoung watched until he fell asleep.

***

Doyoung woke from dreams of owls, each of whom had a dozen eyes, and mice crafted of crystal and glass. It took him a moment to realize that why he had woken; someone was knocking on the door.

He dragged himself out of bed. He had only just gotten dressed when the bedroom door flew open and Hyunjin let herself inside.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I was so worried about you!” She engulfed him in a hug before he could say a word. She had a lingering cold about her, as if winter hadn’t relented its grasp on her skin quite yet, and her clothes and hair were damp with melting snow.

“I never thought I’d see that,” Johnny commented from the doorway.

Hyunjin pulled away from Doyoung and turned back to scowl at Johnny.

Even as she did so, a vision faltered before Doyoung’s eyes. She stood before him, in ancient times, her strawberry red hair down past her waist, and braided into twists and loops, her eyes large and unseeing. She was opened, down the front, much as Park Byungho had been opened, but while Byungho had been immaculately and ghastly clean, Hyunjin was a bloody mess, her linen and cotton dress stained to ruin.

“The dress,” Doyoung said aloud.

Hyunjin turned back to him. “Sorry?”

“The dress. The one you were wearing when… when they…” He swallowed. “It became a relic, didn’t it? And whoever has it… they can foresee when you’re going to be reborn again, and where.”

Hyunjin was staring at him blankly. “Well, yes,” she said. “I mean, yes, I knew all of that.”

Doyoung turned to Johnny. “And you stole it.”

Johnny was leaning against the doorway, his arms crossed. “It was a different time,” he said.

“If you returned it…” Doyoung’s mouth was dry. “Would you and the God-En stop fighting?”

Johnny considered him. “Perhaps,” he said.

“I could convince him,” Hyunjin said softly. She glanced back at Johnny. “It’s been long enough to let bygones be bygones, hasn’t it?”

“Doyoung seems determined to take all of my nemeses away from me,” Johnny told her frankly.

“Not Hyungsik,” Doyoung said, wavering on his feet. “Even if you and En weren’t fighting anymore… both of you hate each other too much to solve anything by giving a dress back to its rightful owner.”

Johnny smiled briefly. “Come on, sweetheart,” he said. “Before you fall over.”

With a bit of help from Hyunjin, Doyoung sat at the kitchen table. While Johnny cooked, she told him about the conditions outside. Only the main roads were plowed, and barely. The walk from her apartment to his, usually not more than a half an hour had lengthened to three, and she only made it with the use of snowshoes. Her coworkers, trapped at Geurimaldi’s, had been texting her with stories of tourists going stir-crazy from being stuck inside.

Johnny served pelmeni, boiled, with steamed broccoli and apples cut into quarters. Hyunjin thanked him, while Doyoung ate it and wondered where in Damyang one found a grocery store with such food. They ate, and drank tea, while Hyunjin scolded Doyoung. “I was so scared when I saw that picture of Park Byungho,” she said. “He looks just like you, I told you! And you brushed it aside.”

“The murdered boy?” Johnny asked in a deceptively casual voice.

“He said it was practice,” Doyoung said. He stared at the dumpling he’d speared on his fork and felt his stomach twist. His appetite didn’t quite vanish. “There was something else… someone grabbed me when I was coming back to my apartment, a week or so before… well, before he actually grabbed me. It must have been him.”

Johnny was staring at him with eyes that suddenly looked a great deal less sleepy, and Doyoung didn’t need any sort of Sight to guess just what he was thinking. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I— At the time, I thought— I thought it was Lucas, acting on Youngho’s orders. He stopped me the next day.” Doyoung thought back. “Or maybe it was a couple of days later…” Johnny was starting to get the mad look in his eyes, when Hyunjin said, quite coldly, “Why should he have said anything about it to you? When did you ever act like you were going to help?”

They both looked at her, and it occurred to Doyoung that while he appreciated the support, he doubted Hyunjin would have been quite so understanding, if it hadn’t been for her rather staunch dislike of Johnny.

Johnny just shook his head. “Did you tell her about the Sight, Doyoung?”

That distracted Hyunjin immediately. “What?” she demanded, turning back to Doyoung.

“Hyungsik gave me the Sight,” Doyoung mumbled.

Hyunjin frowned. “I knew he could do that,” she admitted. “But he never did, not for anyone, not unless En ordered him to… Why…?”

Johnny smiled, briefly and cynically. “I don’t know,” Doyoung said hoarsely.

“Sure you do,” Johnny said affectionately.

“Why did he single you out for this sacrifice in the first place?” Hyunjin asked. “And how did you get away?”

“That would be because of me— your first question, anyway,” Johnny said. “He’s a petty old bastard.”

“Well, of course,” Hyunjin said coldly.

Doyoung stared at both of them, narrow-eyed. He didn’t have the energy or the interest in moderating any fights at the moment.

“Your En— he doesn’t actually need a sacrifice,” Johnny continued darkly. “Hyungsik’s going above and beyond in his service— that, or he’s using the idea of a sacrifice as a front to hide behind. You’d know better than I would, darling,” he added, to Doyoung.

“He never needed a sacrifice,” Hyunjin said. She stabbed a dumpling especially viciously. “Never. But need, or lack thereof, never stopped them for a second. Bjarnmothr or Yura or Vicelun or any of his precious followers.”

Johnny looked extraordinarily amused. “No, he never needed it,” he agreed. “Traditionally, you sacrifice to a god because you want them to do something for you— a good harvest or a plague upon your enemies or the dead staying dead, that sort of thing. The only thing anyone wants of a chthonic god in the early twenty-first century is that they should go away.” He paused, gazing at her. “But you’re here… and before the new year is in, he’ll be back, and roaming the countryside again. Enemessar in Seoul. What potential.”

“Give him back the goddamned dress,” Doyoung hissed.

Johnny laughed. “I’ll give it to you,” he promised Hyunjin. “It belonged to you, originally, anyway. You can decide whether or not you want En to have it.” Doyoung couldn’t disagree with that.

After eating, Doyoung retreated into his bedroom, as he usually did. Hyunjin noticed the limp, but she didn’t comment on it. She followed him into the room, and sat down at the foot of his bed, frowning at him. “What’s going on with you and Johnny?”

“He’s barely a room away,” Doyoung protested. “He can hear everything.”

She shrugged, but she lowered her voice, for all that that was unlikely to help, given Johnny’s sharp hearing. “Something’s changed.”

Doyoung swallowed hard. “He saved me,” he said, and wouldn’t say anymore.

**

When he dreamed, he dreamt of snow.

He walked past lines of coffins, all them opened, all of them half buried in the snow. He walked and walked, until the coffins turned to graves, dug six feet into dirty snow and solid ice, and within, more coffins. He summoned up a little courage and glanced over the side of one such grave, to the contents within.

It was empty.

When he woke, he thought, for a moment, that his window was open. There was a breeze in the air, cold wind cutting through the warmth of the stove. He tried to sit up, and realized he was still asleep. Still, he looked over the scene; himself and Hyunjin, curled up together in bed like kittens, and Johnny sitting in the chair beside the bed, his hands in his lap. Patient. Waiting.

The shadows shifted— that was the only way to describe it— and Hyungsik stepped out, into Doyoung’s bedroom, his first footstep silent on the hard wood floor, his second echoing.

He gazed at Johnny, who had been expecting him, and said, softly, “I owe you a murder.”

“So I’m told,” Johnny answered, just as gravely. His gaze flickered over to Doyoung and back, as good as a gesture. “But you didn’t take your chance when you had it.”

Hyungsik didn’t answer, but stared at Doyoung, sleeping, quiet.

To Doyoung— who could see through the vision— he looked haggard, in some need of a shave, his hands bloody and filthy as if he had been digging graves with them. His coat was torn, here and there, leaking stuffing. Still, he radiated that familiar old power, that heaviness of being, and his eyes were mad, as if one looked on heaven and the other into hell.

Doyoung knew, with a clarity that he could never have explained, that when Hyungsik looked at him, he saw Emin.

“I’ve come for the girl,” Hyungsik said, and his mouth stretched back into a grin like a threat. “The time is almost here. But the boy… I’ll be back for the boy. Someday.”

“Someday,” Johnny said, just as dangerously. “I’ll be back for you.”

If that gave Hyungsik pause, it didn’t show. “You mean to make peace with the god,” he remarked, his voice droll, and he glanced back at Johnny as if hardly interested in the answer.

“Perhaps,” Johnny said. “And perhaps I’ll make peace with my brother as well.” He paused. “Perhaps I’ll undo my Fall.”

There were threats and promises layered into those words, and Doyoung truly understood none of it.

Hyungsik only looked at him, and then turned back to the bed.

He reached over them— his hand paused at Doyoung, but moved on, to grab Hyunjin’s shoulder and shake her. She blinked sleepily and sat up, and when she did finally open her eyes and look, it was to stare at him with a hatred that Johnny hadn’t allowed himself to express.

“It’s time,” Hyungsik said simply, and for all her fury, Hyunjin climbed out of bed and stood up straight, barefoot in her jeans and t-shirt, her blue hair a tangled bird’s nest on one side of her head. With the utmost dignity, she took Hyungsik’s proffered arm, and with only a withering backwards glance at Johnny, she allowed him to take her away.

Johnny simply watched them go, back into the shadows, and Doyoung’s vision dissolved into dreams, chaotic and strange, but calm, as quiet, deathly calm as the dead of midwinter.

Until he woke, with a start.

It was still dark. Johnny had moved from his chair, but only to put another log in the stove. “What’s happened?” Doyoung demanded, his voice hardly better than a whimper. “Hyunjin—”

Johnny didn’t answer immediately, but crossed the room to pull open the curtains of the window.

“Do you want to look?” he asked Doyoung.

Doyoung needed some help to hobble across the room— his leg seemed to have grown stiffer as he slept— but Johnny helped him, and then held him up, to stare out, at the black night. Far off, in the depths of the mountains in the north, lightning struck again and again, churning the clouds overhead electric blue and sickly gray and bloody red. Through the clouds, the northern lights began to play again, cutting like a green ribbon. It was utterly silent, without the first or last hint of thunder.

“Enemessar,” Doyoung breathed, before he thought better of it.

“It’s been a long sleep,” Johnny said in amusement, with all the shared sympathy of an immortal.

“What happens now?” Doyoung asked.

Johnny kissed his cheek. “Whatever happens will happen,” he said. “But you’ll be all right. I’ll make sure of it.”

**

 


End file.
